Locked and Downloaded
by Thumbtax
Summary: When a diplomatic visit to a new "game" turns into a one-way ticket out of the arcade, it's beginning to look like curiosity's killed the Vanellope. It's up to the rest of the gang, plus a newly-unlocked playable character, to come to the rescue. Now COMPLETE!
1. The New World

All characters are the property of Walt Disney Corporation. Enjoy!

* * *

"But I'm the _President!_"

"And I don't care," Tapper said calmly, wiping out an empty mug. "I can't serve root beer to a minor."

"Aw, come on!"

"Sorry. Not unless I see some ID."

Vanellope reached into her inventory and pulled out something gold, shiny, and the size of a dinner plate. "Look, my face is on the fudge-flippin' money, okay?"

Tapper eyed the gold coin. "Official state or federal proof of birthday required. Sorry, kid."

"Fine," Vanellope sniffed, picking up a napkin and signing it with a flourish of crayon. "I'm the president of SugarRush Speedway, so if I write it myself, it's official, right? Here you go."

Tapper's wide eyes narrower slightly. "Date of birth: 1979? Right, next you'll be telling me you starred in _Adventure_."

"How do you know I didn't?" Vanellope protested. "That little dot coulda been anybody!"

"Nope, this one's going right up on the ol' Hall of Shame," Tapper said, pinning Vanellope's napkin next to a crudely photocopied card bearing the name 'Adult Icarus'. "Now, if you'll excuse me, looks like I've got a customer."

"_I'm_ a customer!"

"The kind that pays in quarters," Tapper clarified, walking back to his starting position. Vanellope glanced up at the screen, which was filled with slightly ice-cream-smeared face of a kid.

"Fine," she grumbled. "Guess I'll just stay back here where nobody can see me."

An enormous hand patted her gently on the head. "Don't you have a whole swimming pool filled with root beer back home?" Ralph asked.

"Well, yeah, but-but that's not the point!" Vanellope fumed. "It's just that-oooh!"

"You're still upset about losing the race last night."

"I would have qualified easy if one of Gloyd's stupid licorice bats hadn't gotten in my face! Then I couldn't see where I was going and I spun out in the saltwater taffy marsh and suddenly I'm lookin' at a whole day of not bein' playable!"

Ralph shrugged. "Take it from me, you can't win 'em all." He grinned. "Besides, it's nice to have the company. I don't know any of the daytime crowd in here. Who'd have thought I'd ever miss getting thrown off that building every day?"

He looked wistfully over the player's shoulder at the spot where the Fix-It Felix Jr. machine had stood until a week ago. Now the spot was taken up by something sleek and white, with only one tiny screen on the front. Ralph thought it looked a little like one of the refrigerators he got to throw on the rare occasions that somebody got all the way to level 36.

"What is that thing, anyway?" Vanellope said, squinting out of the screen. "It looks kinda like one of those refrigerators around Snowanna's track."

"Some new game," Ralph shrugged. "Only here temporarily. Kids seem to like it okay, but between you and me, I'll be glad when it's out of here and Felix and I get our spot back." He slurped down the last of his own root beer and crushed the mug into glittering powder.

"Well, I never saw a game like that before," Vanellope said. "Sure is popular, though. Lookit all those kids. What are the people like in that neck of the woods, you figure?"

"I don't know. They haven't set foot in here."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure," Ralph nodded. "I've been sitting in this booth long enough to cause screen burn-in and I haven't seen anyone new come in."

Vanellope raised one coal-black eyebrow. "You mean you've been parking your stinky butt here all week? I thought you were bunkin' with the lovebirds."

"Er, yeah," Ralph coughed, "the base is nice, and all, but a little cramped. And then there's Calhoun's, uh, condition."

Vanellope elbowed Ralph in the ribs. "I know what you're talking about. The Birdos and the Beezos. Collecting power-ups for two. An extra life in her inventory. A sequel in development. Preparing for the expansion-"

"I just meant the snoring, but that too."

Vanellope stood up. "Well, you can hang around in this snooze-hole if you want, but I'm gonna go roll out the welcome wagon!"

"Be-" Ralph began, but realized he was looking at a quickly fading shimmer of blue light. "-careful."

"Trust me," Vanellope called from the door. "I know how to get out of a jam when I need to."

* * *

"Helloooooo?"

Vanellope's voice echoed down the long, silvery tube. She glanced back over her shoulder at the local station. It was clean-no, more than that, aside from a few flecks of frosting that had fallen off of her shoe, it was _spotless_. Like it had never been used. Her eyes darted up to the title, spelled out on the wall in black pixels.

MINIMON BATTLERS PROMO DISTRIBUTION

"What kinda name is that?" she wondered. "And where the H-E-double pixie sticks _is_ everybody?" She remembered Ralph's warning and felt a twinge in her stomach. Most games weren't really too dangerous if you stayed off-screen, but there _were_ things like Cy-Bugs out there which didn't care about the rules.

"Naaah," she told herself. "Don't be such a yellow M&M. This is probably just one of those ones with no people in it, like _Tetris_."

The only reason she even knew what _Tetris_ was was that sometimes people sneaked into it to make out, at least according to Taffyta.

She walked forward into the featureless hallway... and walked... and walked, glitching occasionally to speed up the process and wishing she'd been able to bring her kart on the train. The hall seemed to go on forever.

"Mother of muffins, where's the _game?_" she whined. "There's kids all over this thing. There's gotta be a game world in here _some_where!"

The hallways stubbornly refused to lead anywhere. Only Vanellope's equal stubborness-and the thought of how a long a walk she'd have back to Game Central Station if she gave up now-kept her going.

And then, when she'd almost stopped expecting it, she found something different.

The narrow hallway opened up into a vast white chamber carpeted in yellow-orange. She hopped down-there was a five-foot drop or so to the floor, nothing she couldn't glitch back up-and suddenly realized that the carpet wasn't a carpet at all. It was an enormous crowd of living creatures.

They were round and yellow, with catlike face and orange manes which made them look half like chubby lions and half like little cartoon suns. Vanellope tensed. Their art style didn't look violent, but you could never be sure.

"Uh, hi, guys," she said. "I'm from SugarRush Speedway. Just touristin' it up here. You know any good spots I outta check out?"

"Sola?" one of the creatures said, cocking its head. "Solasolasola!" another one agreed, and then dozens of them took up the call, curling themselves into balls and rolling around on the smooth floor.

"Ohhhh-kay, I'm startin' to think maybe you guys aren't the 'people' I'm lookin' for," Vanellope said. "What are you, enemies?"

She struck her palm with a tiny fist. "That's it, isn't it? I know where I am now! This is one of those rooms where you guys all wait so you can keep popping out of, of a pipe, or whatever. It's gotta be! So all I have to do is find where that is..."

She swept her gaze across the room. There was something, a tunnel of some kind, just visible on the far distant side of the room.

"...and I can peek out into the game world!"

She glitched across the room in leaps and bounds.

"Just a peek," she promised herself, "just a peek, oh, boy, but I can't _stand_ it! Outta the way outta the way outta the _way!_"

The creatures rolled away from the mysterious flashing object cutting a gleeful swathe through them. In moments, Vanellope had closed the distance, arriving at the other side and glitching up into the tunnel like a bolt of blue lightning. It was another tube, she discovered, but this one was far more poorly lit than the one she'd entered by, fading to pitch black only a few steps in.

"Hello?" she called into the darkness. She took another hesitant step. There was something strange about the air ahead of her.

"Docking in progress," said a pleasant woman's voice in the stillness. "Prepare for distribution."

Something soft and warm nuzzled her, and she almost glitched out of her skin before she realized it was just one of the yellow creatures.

"Hey, after you, buddy," Vanellope said. "I don't even know where I'm goin' in here."

She felt the furry body waddling forward, and a moment later there was a merry chime, like the sound of someone grabbing a powerup.

"Distribution in progress," the voice continued. The tunnel lit up with rings of vivid green, alternating with the black like a photonegative candy cane. The creature's silhouette was starkly visible against the bright green light.

"Distribution?" Vanellope asked. "Hey, lady, do you know the way to-"

An irresistible force ripped her off her feet.

For a few seconds, the utter suddenness and disorientation of it was too much, and all she could do was tumble end over end, shrieking in terror. Then her racer's instincts took over and she got a hold of herself, extended her arms and legs, and straightened out.

She was flying level now, but she still didn't have any control over her speed, let alone her eventual destination. The rings were flying by at an incredible rate; wherever it was, she was coming in hot. She tried a few experimental glitches, but couldn't do more than slow herself down momentarily.

Wherever she was headed, it was warm, and it was getting brighter by the second. She braced herself for the crash-not that that would do much good without a kart-and hoped that she wasn't headed for a lava pit.

_WHUMF._

Nope. It was a nicely padded surface, as it turned out. Quite comfortable, in fact.

"Well, that wasn't so-"

_WHUMF._

As soon as she was able to blink the stars out of her eyes, she scrambled out from under the pudgy yellow creature which had just landed on her head. She looked back up the way they'd comeand managed to catch the briefest glimpse of the tunnel before a solid-looking steel hatch slammed shut across the opening.

"Not getting back that way, I guess," Vanellope said with a shrug. "Guess I'm goin' wherever you're goin', Chubbs."

There really was no reason to worry. If she just stuck with her new companion, she was sure to find her way back to that big chamber eventually.

* * *

"Melissa, aren't you done yet?"

"One sec, Mom!" Melissa called over the heads of the kids behind her. "I'm getting it now!"

Someone shoved her. "Hurry up, kid, other people want 'em too, ya know."

"I can't help it!" Melissa protested. "Mine's taking forever for some reason. See, there it goes."

The screen of her little handheld lit up. CONGRATULATIONS, it said, YOU CAPTURED SOLEON! Melissa yanked it out of the trade port and squeezed through the mass of kids to where her mother was waiting by the door.

"Did you get your thing?"

"Yeah, I got it," Melissa said with a grin, holding up the handheld. "See?"

"Well, it's about time. Don't you have enough of those little things already without dragging me to some skeevy arcade?"

"No, Mom, this is Soleon. You have to get him from one of the Minimon Centers and they're only here for a few more days and this is the only one in _town!_" Melissa said. She hugged her little battery-powered baby to her heart. "Anyway, I've _got_ mine now, so you can relax. You'll never have to bring me back _here_ again."

* * *

To be continued-please leave a review, if you'd like!


	2. Beechwood Minimon Laboratory

Thanks for all your kind reviews! It definitely kept me enthusiastic about finishing another chapter! This is a rather short one, but I'm looking forward to doing the chapter after this introducing Felix and Calhoun.

* * *

"Hey, Karen! Uh-huh. Yeah, I finally got it. I know, right?" Melissa laughed into the phone. "My mom couldn't take me until today, and it was way too far to walk. So I'm totally having to power-level it. Yeah, I have it paired up with Cactapult and I'm gonna go to that cave with all the level 60 Bloatalloons, 'cause you know, Cactapult can one-shot those. I mean I looked up the stats and its not like Soleon is even that good, you know? It was kinda cool how they gave Princess Vanellope a cameo, though."

She paused, listening to the voice on the other end of the line.

"Huh? Yes, they did. The princess from the Sugar Rush games? You can see her on the screen when you get Soleon. You can so!...Well, on mine you could! What version do you have?"

She flopped backwards onto her pillow. "I'm not making it up! There really is... I _can't_ put it on YouTube because I wasn't_ recording_ it, duh. But when you sync it with the console and you go to the thing in the lab, she comes out and there's this whole long scene where she's all like 'ooh, what kind of game is this' and the professor is all like 'oh no, your highness, there's a player watching'. It's really funny and it totally gets all meta and stuff! Jeez, were we even playing the same game?"

* * *

"Fascinating!"

The old man pulled a clear plastic monogoggle from his waistcoat pocket and plunked it into one squinty eye.

"Absolutely fascinating!" he continued excitedly. He rested one white-gloved hand on the top of Vanellope's head and tilted it to the side so he could peer down into her ear canal.

"Why don't ya take a screenshot, it'll last longer," Vanellope grumbled. "Who are you, anyway? 'Cause unless you outrank a president you might wanna rethink manhandlin' me."

"Ah, well, excuse me. Professor Alphonse Aloysius Beechwood, at your service. Minimon researcher by trade."

"Mini-what?"

"Minimon. Adorable little creatures with vicious fighting spirits."

"Oh." Vanellope grinned. "Well, I see how you could get us confused, but I'm not a 'Minimon'. I told you, I'm from across the-"

"The _arcade_," Beechwood murmured, his voice catching slightly. "Yes, you... you mentioned."

"Well, so what are you so interested in little old me for?"

Beechwood walked over to the window. The sun was sinking in the sky as the real-time day-night cycle continued its advance. Orange light slanted through the windows of the lab, falling across shelves full of dusty tomes and tables covered in racks of glass containment tubes.

"Would you like to know a secret?" he said, staring out over the well-clipped lawn of the Minimon Laboratory. "I've never really cared for Minimon. Oh, they keep the lights on around here, that's true, and I suppose I do a good enough job of making them sound interesting to the player, but I've never really _liked _them. Rather boring little beasts, to tell the truth." He turned to face her. "No, my real passion is anthropology. Unlocking the past. The hunt for... the ancient Arcadians."

"The wha?"

"The Arcadians! The first people!" His eyes glowed with excitement as he gestured broadly, as if trying to wake up a half-asleep class. "After the Age of Text, when the earliest known lifeforms exploded outward from the primordial mainframes and first began to diversify into discrete gameworlds! Do you know, I still remember the day I first felt this passion stirring within my code. I was at the _Marvel vs. Capcom_ symposium delivering a paper on, oh, Learnable Special Moves of the Stampedo or some such rot, when I happened to step into a lecture in three rounds on the origins of digital life. Wily and Octavius, I believe. Great men."

He whirled on her, raising one quivering finger in a gesture of triumph.

"But they didn't know everything! They were wrong. They said you were all dead, you see. Gone extinct years ago! And yet... here you stand! A real-life Arcadian. A_ living fossil!_"

"Well, hey, I'm only nine, ya know," Vanellope frowned. "An' my game's from 1997. We're not that old."

"To think that there are still arcades out there, still operating, still developing new life completely independent of what we on consoles no." The old man blinked a few blue pixels out of his eyes. "By Miyamoto, I never thought I'd see this day."

"Uh, that's great and all," Vanellope said. "But I don't really get what you mean. The way you're talking, it's almost like you're saying we're not even in the arcade anymore."

"But my dear, of course we're not in an arcade!" Beechwood blinked. "This is a home console. A Tobikomi GamePort, as a matter of fact. The question, it seems, is how did you get here?"

"That's what I want to know!" Vanellope cried. "I was just mindin' my own business, explorin' this new game, and I get sucked into some, some little holding cell or somethin' along with that little cat thing, and then after like an hour I get spat out on my butt in your lab!"

"Hmm," Beechwood mused. "Yes, yes, I begin to get the picture. We've long known Minimon can migrate to handheld systems and even between them. It isn't too much of a stretch to think that perhaps other lifeforms could make the same trip."

"Well, look, as much as I'd love to hang around here listenin' to you talk about how amazing I am, I have way too many people back home to do that already. And speakin' of home, I really should be headin' back there before tonight, or I'll miss the qualifier race, and I sure don't want to sit out _another_ day of racin'."

"I'm afraid you don't fully comprehend your situation," Professor Beechwood said gravely. "There _is_ no way back. At least, I certainly don't know of one."

Vanellope shrugged and jabbed a thumb at the door. "Then I guess I'll just have to find somebody who does. Smell ya later, pal!"

"Wait!" Beechwood's hand closed around her arm. "You can't just leave. You're the specimen of a lifetime!"

"I'm a president, not a specimen. And I really gotta be goin'."

Beechwood's hand tightened. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't let you do that."

There was a flash of blue-white light, and the old scientist felt for a second as if his body were coming apart at the seams, as if every line of code were being stripped out, examined, and replaced. Almost before he realized something was happening, the feeling faded. He looked down at his tingling arm and empty hand quizzically.

"I'm sorry," Vanellope said from the windowsill, performing a curtsey that somehow managed to be both regal and sarcastic, "but I'm afraid I really must insist, my dear old fart."

"Amazing," Beechwood repeated softly. "To think that the Arcadians could...can...control their very bodily structure on the code level!"

"Oh, that's kinda just me," Vanellope grinned. "I'm sorta special that way."

There was another flash of light, and the sill was empty. The window flapped open, letting in the gloomy moan of the early evening breeze and the chirruping drone of insects.

_Cicadio,_ Beechwood thought automatically, _a bug-type Minimon._

His conscious mind was rather more concerned with the frustrating paradox he'd just been saddled with. _The perfect specimen,_ he mused. She was so unique, in fact, that her abilities would make it practically impossible to keep her secured. Certainly none of his minimon containment devices had been designed with short-range teleportation in mind.

_But I can't just let her run around out there_, he realized. _Not if I want to publish first. Who knows who she might talk to? Especially if she gets into the other games. And what if she runs into-_

He blinked. There was his answer, of course. If there was anyone who would certainly be a match for the newcomer in both wits and resources, it would have to be _her_. And she would certainly cooperate, once he explained how it would be in her own best interest.

It took him ten minutes on his hands and knees and a large block of Minimon chow, but he finally managed to lure a Cicadio in close enough that he could grab it. He pried the struggling beetle's carapace open and twisted the bony dials underneath until he was pointed to exactly the right frequency, then whispered into the vibrating antennae:

"Hello? Hello? This is Professor Beechwood from _Minimon, Topaz Version_. Do you read me?"

"Yes," said a dull monotone voice. "I read you."

"Thank goodness! Listen closely, Bill," Beechwood said solemnly. "I have reason to believe that an impostor may be after the Princess."


	3. You And Me And Baby Makes DLC

Suppressing a wince, Sergeant Tamera Jean Calhoun lifted the Quantum CryoPace Torso Protection System from her shoulders and let it drop heavily to the floor of her apartment. Her aching muscles twinged.

"Is that you, sugar biscuit?" her husband called cheerfully from the kitchen, trotting out to meet her. He eyed the armor reproachfully. "Now, I don't think you ought to be wearing all that bulky stuff in your condition. Remember what Dr. Mario said-"

"This is the only armor I can wear 'in my condition' that doesn't show off my 'condition' to every rugrat in the arcade," Calhoun shot back, running one gyro-gloved hand over her swollen abdomen. "I just hope none of them ever get good enough to beat the game in under two hours. I'm _not_ looking forward to trying to squeeze into that bikini."

She plopped down on the couch with a groan and put her feet up on the ottoman. "Now get over here and work your magic for Mama."

Felix walked out of the kitchen, twirling his golden hammer. "Well, what exactly seems to be the trouble?"

"I've been strafing for two all day. My shins are killing me."

"I can fix it!" Felix said cheerfully. "I mean, them." He gave his wife a light tap on each knee. She kicked a little involuntarily, then sighed and wriggled her toes.

"That's the stuff. Kind of a shame you can't be around every day. Nice having someone on the home front to come back to." She glanced at his apron. "Doing a little cooking?"

"Well, trying to. I thought you and the baby might appreciate something other than liquid nutrients in a baggie every once in a while."

"Careful how much you spoil me, little man. You're going to make me get soft." Her eyes sparkled. "But I'll let it slide this time. What did you make?"

"Oh, er-" He looked away. "Nothing, really."

"No, what?"

"Well-" He held out a bowl.

"A dozen raw eggs, a block of cheese, and a mushroom?" She raised an eyebrow.

Felix blushed. "It started off as an omelet, but I-I forgot what I was doing and I used the hammer-"

"It looks great!"

"Aw, shuck, you're just saying that."

"No. I love eating eggs." She tossed one in the air and caught it in her mouth with a crunch. "It reminds me of _victory._"

"J-jiminy jaminy," Felix gulped. "Raw and everything."

"The only way to eat eggs," Calhoun said with a nod, licking a fleck of yolk from the corner of her mouth. She frowned slightly. "Ooh."

"What is it?"

"I'm not sure." She put a hand on her stomach. "There's... something going on down there. You didn't just slip me a Yoshi egg, did you?"

"Of course not!" Felix rested a hand next to hers.

"There!" Calhoun said after a moment. "You _had _to have felt that one."

"I felt it!" Felix said excitely. "The baby's _jumping!_"

"'Jumping'? The manuals didn't say anything about jumping. Kicking, maybe, but-"

"Perfectly natural in my game," Felix said proudly. "Nothing to worry about."

"Easy for you to say. You're the not the one taking piledrivers to the gut." She sighed. "But I supposed I knew what I was getting into when we decided to have a bi-codal child..."

"Well, it shouldn't be much longer now."

"Can't come soon enough," Calhoun groused. "It seems like every other day now another one of my inventory slots is taken up with... well...more of _me._ I'm starting to feel like I'm losing my edge."

Felix took her hand in his. "Well, I can certainly fix _that._"

"Oh, really?"

The wall communicator crackled into life. "Ma'am, we've got a perimeter breach."

Despite her size, Calhoun was on her feet in one smooth motion, cocking her plasma pistol with one hand and pushing Felix behind her with the other. "You, stay back. I'll check it out."

"It's okay, guys, it's just me," said Ralph's familiar voice. "Is Vanellope with you?"

"No. Should she be?"

"Well, I hoped-look, I kinda need to see you guys. It's important."

"It better be," Calhoun muttered. "Come on in, Ralph."

"Ma'am, he smashed through the outer wall-"

"Then guard the breach until the damage fades! No, wait, have someone else do it. You show Ralph the way here."

"But ma'am-"

"No buts, Markowski. If he doesn't get an escort he'll tear through every building on this base trying to find us."

"Well, in my defense your barracks all look kind of similiar," Ralph said sheepishly. "You might think about numbering them."

"I'll take it under consideration." Calhoun said. "Over and out."

* * *

"My land!" gasped Felix. "She's missing?"

"She was checking out that new game, the one that's in our spot." Ralph said, running one enormous hand through his unkempt hair in agitation. "I didn't even realize there was something wrong until the arcade was almost closed and she wasn't back yet. So I go over there myself but there was no sign of her, just a big room full of cats or something. Then I got worried about how maybe the other racers fell back into their old ways, you know? So I stopped by Sugar Rush to make a few polite inquiries..."

* * *

"You're not holding out on me are you?"

"I haven't seen her since the race last night! Really!"

"'Cause if find out later that you guys started picking on Vanellope again, well, maybe I'll have to come back with a little..._birthday wish._"

"No! Not my candle! I swear I'm telling you the truth! _Not my candle!_"

* * *

"...but I came up empty, so I was hoping maybe she came over here. I'm starting to get pretty worried."

Calhoun slipped the plasma pistol into its holster. "I'll take the men on a sweep of the arcade. And I'll put in a request to the data cores for any intelligence we have on that new console."

"Maybe... maybe you ought to stay behind," Felix suggested hesitated. "I mean, not _stay behind_-stay behind, but... coordinate things from the... the rear flank?"

"That's not how this soldier rolls."

"But...the baby."

"Why do you think I'm going? This little payload had got me jacked so full of Mom juice, I couldn't stand by if I wanted to. Not if that kid might be in trouble."

* * *

"Hey you! Let's have a Minimon battle!" the very enthusiastic boy screamed, jumping out of the bushes.

"How abouuuuut... we don't?" Vanellope countered.

"You don't get off that easily!" the boy shouted, pulling a glass container from his pocket. "I'm gonna show you how fearsome my Minimon are!"

"They're not more bugs again, are they?"

The boy stopped with the container lid half unscrewed. "No. I mean, n-not necessarily."

"'Cause I've seen about a jillion of you guys and you've all got the same thing. Anyway, I don't _have_ any Minimon for you to fight. I'm trying to find Game Central Station."

"Well, maybe I'll tell you... if you can defeat my _Minimo-_"

"Aw, forget it, I'll try the next one."

"Wait! Come back, kid!" the Minimon trainer said. "I was just having fun, yeesh. Look, you mean the menu channel, right? All you gotta do is go through the old dummied-out train tunnel in Origin Town."

He pointed back over her shoulder at the tops of the brick buildings. Vanellope sighed. "Back _there?_"

The trainer hefted his canister and smiled. "We can take the shortcut through the tall grass! It'll be a great chance for me to have more _Minimon Battles!_"

"Well, whoop-de-Dippin' Dots."

Fourteen unconscious Vermiworms and Cicadios later, the two stood at the crumbling, mossy entryway. The trainer pointed into the darkness. "Through there. Watch the first step, it's kinda big."

"Thanks," Vanellope shrugged, "I'll be careful. I've had enough plummetin' helplessly through space for one daaaEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeee..."

"Er..." the trainer said, staring nervously into the empty shaft, "you're welcome?"

* * *

Vanellope caught herself with a last-minute glitch, touching down gently on the tiled floor of the menu channel. She turned and looked way, way up to where she'd come from. The menu channel was a lot like Game Central Station, a long hall with portals to the various gameworlds, but the ceiling was vastly higher. All the portals were arrayed on one wall in a grid; she wasn't sure at all how you were supposed to get to the ones on top if you couldn't fly. But it wasn't like she wanted to go back to _that_ world, anyway.

The other wall was entirely taken up with one _huge_ glass window which looked out on a bedroom that looked a lot like Vanellope's, except the furniture wasn't made of candy. It took her a moment to realize that what she was seeing wasn't a game, but the outside world.

_So all the games here share the same screen_, she thought. Did that mean only one game could be played at a time? Just trying to imagine how a world like this would work boggled her mind.

It was also too dark and far too crowded for her to see where she was going. She scanned the shadowy figures of the passers-by, looking for a familiar face. She knew that even if she met a Ralph here, it wouldn't be _her_ Ralph, but at least she could pretend she wasn't alone. Right now she was starting to realize just how far away from home she was, and she would be happy to take what she could get.

She passed a lower-level screen which was guarded by a pair of knights in polished bronze armor that glinted even in the the dim lighting. One of them had her helmet off, and waves of blonde hair spilled over her shoulders, clipping through her enormous pauldrons. She reminded Vanellope a little bit of Calhoun. And if there was anybody who could be counted on to take charge in an unfamiliar situation...

"'Scuse me," she said, sauntering up. "So, I'm lookin' for a way back to my game-yikes!"

She found her way barred by a pair of crossed halberds. "No entry!" the guard snapped.

"But I'm just trying to-"

"Service on this _Empire of Questing_ account has been terminated," the guard said. "I'm sorry if you happened to be outside when it happened, but there's a dozen other gnomelings in this GamePort with the same story, and if we let _you_ back in-"

"Hey! Who're you calling a gnomeling? I'm from _Sugar Rush Speedway. _I'm trying to get back to my game."

The knight blinked. "Oh, it's _you!_ Excuse me, your highness."

Vanellope didn't bother correcting her. "Yeah, it's me, and I need to find a way back to the arcade before-"

The lights flickered on along the length of the hallway. "SYSTEM ON! SYSTEM ON!," blared the loudspeakers. A few people shrieked, or started running, but most of them simply began filing into the portals as if they were entirely used to this.

Vanellope blinked. The harsh white lights had taken her by surprise and practically blinded her.

"What's happening?"

"We've been turned on!" the knight barked. "Get to your game."

"Wha- but I-"

"Over there!" Vanellope felt the cool metal gauntlet seize her by the shoulder and give her a firm shove. She stumbled forward, disoriented, until she felt the telltale tingle on her skin and realized she'd passed into a gameworld.

She inhaled. The air around her was warm and sweet and familiar.

_Could it be...?_

As her eyes adjusted to the light, the ground under her feet came into focus. Crusty granules of colored sugar, stretching out before her in a beautiful rainbow race track. Forests of candy trees. And beyond them, mountains of ice cream, pools of melted frosting, and the castle she remembered so well.

"Sweet mother of monkey milk!" she cried jubilantly, running towards the castle. "I'm _home!_"

* * *

"Target confirmed," growled the red ball of candy, furrowing his brow. He adjusted one of the sugar stars pinned to what he had decided was going to be his chest. "I've got six tubes of icing trained on her from the upper sucrasphere. You give me those codes, and-"

"Not so fast, General," said the young woman standing next to him, folding a golden telescope between two white-gloved hands. "This is very... interesting. That old monster trainer man didn't mention she was from the '97 game."

"An inferior impostor is still an impostor, ma'am!" the General barked. "I say we frost the brat from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

"I said we're leaving her alive!" the Princess snapped. "For now. I'm curious about her."

A cruel smile spread across her face.

"And when I've had my fun," she continued, "_then_ we can show her how we deal with pretenders to the throne here in _Sugar Rush Speedway 2000_."


	4. Two Scoops of Vanilla

"That's the east wing...I believe that's new to you," Vanille 2K said loftily, pointing down a massive hallway constructed of rough-hewn candy logs, "and of course they had to add a conservatory and another half-dozen swimming pools onto the west side of the castle just to keep the structure balanced, you know. Now, along here is where I keep all of my finest sugar crystal... are you listening to me, _old_ Vanellope?"

The old Vanellope was examining the thick strawberry-fudge baseboards which ran all the length of the Great Hall. "It's just like my palace only... only everything's _sharper_."

"Well, we had a few more polygons available to us than _you_ did in back in the _old_ games. Now, you'll notice the sugar crystal is of _exceptionally_ fine-"

"Everything's just so clear," Vanellope breathed, running her finger across the top of the baseboard. "It all just comes into focus, like gettin' new glasses or something."

She examined her finger. "Oop, little dusty though."

Vanille 2k frowned. "Excuse me. That's just the baseboard. I didn't bring you here to gawk at the baseboards. _Tom!_" The princess clapped imperiously.

General Atomic F. Bill strutted forward. "All right, ah, Princess Number 2, we've got a lot to see today. So march!"

"All right, all right, hold your Hos-Hos," Vanellope said. "This place is cool, is all. It's like where I live, only different. It's amazing!"

"Yes, well," Vanille 2k smirked, "it _is_, isn't it?"

"And you! It's so weird looking at _me_, only... taller, and...spikier. And the dress they gave me wasn't nearly that awesome. It was dorky-lookin' and I couldn't race with it on or anythin'."

Vanille 2k twirled in her pink racing suit. "My dress works with me when I race. This skirt functions as a drag chute, you know."

"Cool!"

"Of course, the old... short...pudgy...stubby ragamuffin look has its...good points, too," Vanille 2k said charitably. "And you know, the castle isn't the only thing that's changed. I have many more friends, now, too."

She clapped again, and General Bill put his wedge-shaped fingers to his mouth and whistled sharply. A small crowd of racers entered, gawking at the new Vanellope and trying to hide their curiosity. Vanellope recognized taller-and-pointier versions of Taffyta, Rancis, Snowanna, and the others, but there were several racers she'd was sure she'd never seen before in any incarnation.

"A whole suite of new characters were added for the 2000 addition. It really gave my kingdom that cosmopolitan, international sort of flair." Vanille 2k coughed. "Not that small provincial backwaters don't _also_ have their good points. But I think you'll enjoy meeting them. Introduce yourselves, World Circuit Racers!"

A boy in a kilt made of tartan Fruit Roll-ups stepped forward and blew a droning blast on the pink bubblegum bagpipe hanging at his side. "Flubbus MacBubbles, lass, nice ta meet yer."

"And I'm Sadoko Amai-mai! Yeah!" chirped a cheerful girl, pole-vaulting into the room on a ten-foot stick of Pocky. Soon, Vanellope had been introduced to Crispin Queenie (the Australian animal-cracker zoologist), Maybelle Tappingtub (the Canadian syrupjack), and Dolcita DeMueria (the crackerjack Mexican racer who wore an imposing sugar-skull mask).

"Wow, you guys all have your own tracks?" Vanellope said excitedly. "This place must be _huge!_ I mean, it's gotta be at least half again as big as Sugar Rush-_my_ Sugar Rush, I mean."

"Three times larger, actually," Vanille 2k corrected her. "There's another entire continent for the Mirror Mode tracks. But enough of this."

She shooed the other racers away with a wave of her scepter. General Bill glared at the few stragglers until they left.

"They are amusing, but between you and me, they get _dull_ very quickly. Nothing but a lot of gimmicks." Vanille 2k shrugged. "Besides, _now _I want to show you a _secret_."

* * *

The three of them descended the darkened staircase, their path lit only by the sparking of wintergreen Life Saver lamps, until Vanellope was sure they had to be deep within the chocolatey bowels of Sugar Rush's firmament.

"How far down does this go, anyway?" she asked. "It's getting hot. We're gonna be hitting diet cola soon."

"We're almost there," Vanille 2k reassured her. "Here we go... right down this hall."

A hand seized hers in the darkness, and Vanellope found herself being pulled into a side passage. A number of heavy-looking vault doors lined the walls.

"What's this, a treasure room?"

"Actually, it's-" Vanille 2k frowned. "Yes, that's right. Actually, _that_ one leads into the source code. You never know when that will come in handy. But the _rest_ are treasure."

"That's a lot of treasure."

"Yes! You see, aside from being popular and beautiful and having a gigantic castle, I'm _also_ extremely wealthy. Go aside; try and guess what's in the biggest one!"

Vanellope gave her a crooked smile. "Your ego?"

Vanille 2k frowned again. "No." She tapped out a code on the nearest door, and it swung open with a heavy squeal. Inside were stacked vast piles of golden bars.

"Wow, are those...?"

"That's right," Vanille 2k said proudly. "Twinkies! I've cornered the entire supply. My royal astrologer says their value is about to skyrocket."

She snapped her fingers and General Bill pushed the heavy door shut.

"Now _that_ vault is filled with only the rarest gourmet jellybeans, handpicked from the slopes of the Muffin Mountains. _This_ one has bars of the purest Toblerone. This one _here_ contains over a billion dollars in chocolate coins, and _this _one..."

She stopped before the last vault and lowered her voice reverantly. "This vault holds the thing that's going to make me the greatest racer in _Sugar Rush Speedway 2000_."

"Really? What is it?" Vanellope said.

"Well..." Vanille 2k hesitated. "I don't know if I should show it to you. It might be too much of an amazingly cool secret to share."

"I won't tell!" Vanellope promised. "Cross my heart and hope to crash!"

Vanille 2k looked her up and down. "If I show you, do you promise not to take it out of the vault?"

"I _totally_ promise!"

"All right. I guess you can take a quick peek." Vanille 2k nodded at General Bill, who pulled the door open. Vanellope stepped forward into the darkened vault, heart pounding with excitement. She peered into the shadows, taking in the bare walls, the empty floor.

"Where is it?" she murmured. "Hello? Secret weapon?"

Everything was quiet. She shrugged and turned around.

"I really hate ta tell you this," she began, "but there's nothin' in here-"

The vault door slammed shut with a loud _clunk._

"Correction," Vanille 2k said, popping her head up into the narrow slot. "There _wasn't _anything in there. _Now_ it has my secret weapon. _You!_"

"Me?" Vanellope blinked. "How am I a secret weapon?"

"Now, don't be so modest!" Vanille 2k said. "I know _all about_ your little _ability, _thanks to that boring old weirdo from _Minimon_."

"My glitching? You...you want me to race in your place, and use my glitching to win for you?" Vanellope crossed her arms. "Well, if you woulda asked nicely, maybe I would have, but if you're gonna get all dungeony about it-"

Vanille 2k cackled. "I don't want someone to win _for_ me. I want to do it myself! And once Professor Beechwood is done pulling your code apart piece by piece and learning what make you tick, _he'll_ be able to do to _my_ code whatever it is _you_ did to _yours_. I'll never lose again!"

Vanellope squeaked with rage and charged towards the little slot and Vanille 2k's smug face. _Let's see how tough you are when I glitch through those bars and plant my fist in your nose!_

She took a flying leap, and _glitched_-

-and bounced backwards into her cell, feeling like she'd just done a bellyflop into Lemonade Lake from the top of the highest mountain in Sugar Rush.

"I wouldn't try glitching out of there, if I were you," Vanille 2k warned, laughing. "The bricks of that vault are pure haribonium, plated with an alloy of boundary."

"Boundary?"

Vanille 2k nodded. "Which is the same stuff the edge of the world is made of. Haven't you ever taken the royal yacht out that far?"

"Since when do I have a royal yacht?"

"For the water races?" Vanille 2k sighed. "Which you don't have, do you? My apologies, for a moment I forgot just how lame the original _Sugar Rush Speedway_ was. Anyway, the boundary is there, and it's absolutely impassible. Even by glitching."

"Well... well, I'll get out somehow!" Vanellope sputtered. "Just watch me!"

"Regrettably, I don't have time to sit here and watch you throw yourself against the wall. I have three parties, a cotillion, and, oh, maybe a wedding or two on my schedule today. So you'll just have to amuse yourself until Beechwood gets here."

"Yeah, well, my friends are gonna find out about this, and-"

"Your friends from the arcade?" Vanille 2k rolled her eyes. "Yeah, 'cause I'm _soooo_ worried about them. Come, Tom. You can help me decide who I'm going to make have a wedding _this_ time."

"We haven't seen Minty/Gloyd in an while..." Vanellope heard the red candy suggest as the top walked away.

She glitched against the wall a couple more times, just to make certain, but her heart wasn't in it, and her body was starting to feel like one big bruise. Eventually, the ache overcame her anger and she sank to the floor, sniffling.

"Great, thrown in the dungeon of my own castle. Again!" she fumed. "What is it about absolute power that just turns people into _jerkbutts?_"


	5. Sequel

Randy had never been a big fan of arcade games. He didn't see the point, plopping in quarters for stuff you could play on an emulator for free. He especially didn't see the appeal of kiddy garbage like Minimon that only existed to sell cartoons and toys. Randy preferred more serious, adult games, like _Empire of Questing_.

_Somebody_ liked Minimon, though. In fact, somebody in the next town over had liked it enough to break into a mall and try to hack one of the distribution centers. Not that Randy was complaining-it was thanks to that that he's scored this sweet security gig at Litwak's. All he had to do was hang around all night and made sure nobody broke in. Easy. And it gave him all night to work on grinding his Rune Elf chaos druid.

Okay, so maybe he _was _tempted to try one of the games once in a while, just for a change. _Hero's Duty_ looked pretty cool. And unlike _Fix-It Felix Jr._, there weren't a zillion free online Flash versions.

Randy plopped in his eight quarters (yeesh-that bought you _four days_ of _EoQ_) and watched the intro. It was okay. The game itself, though, was pretty bland. Just shooting alien bugs.

_Where's the chick from the ads?_ he wondered. In the commercials, you got a whole squad of space marines backing you up. Without them, the game felt sort of one-dimensional, like it was pretty graphics and not much else.

One of bugs flew in from the side and munched him. He never even saw it coming. Game Over.

He stuck the plastic gun back in its holster in disgust. How were you supposed to fight those? There probably _were _supposed to be soldiers guarding the flanks, he decided, and they just weren't spawning for some reason. He'd noticed that problem with a _lot_ of games here. At least half the screens had the characters doing weird things, or not showing up onscreen at all.

"Who'd break into this place?" he muttered, heading back to his laptop and _Empire of Questing_. Nobody, that's who. And that meant his job would stay nice and boring, just how he liked it.

* * *

"Oh, jiminy jaminy! Call a doctor! Boil some water! Get a-"

"Calm down," Calhoun told her husband sternly. "I had a CyWasp implant its egg sac in my lower intestine during the campaign on Trylos XI. After that, this is nothing."

"But the baby is coming! The baby is coming!" Felix said, hyperventilating into a paper sack. He was breathing so hard it kept bursting, and he had to keep tapping the fragments in midair to reassemble them; the sound was something like _hfft-fft-BANG-dingle, hfft-fft-BANG-dingle_. It wasn't exactly relaxing.

"I said calm down! And that's an order!" Calhoun repeated. "Look. We are perfectly safe. The perimeter is under heavy guard. Why don't you go wait with Ralph and the others?"

"But-but-but-"

"_I will be fine. _ Giving birth is just like war. It's a long, grueling, exhausting process, but in the end, all you need is the guts to make one last final push to victory."

Felix paused. "Honey pudding... exactly how many times have you given birth?"

"Well... never for real," she admitted, "but I practiced on the simulator. Now march! This could get a little dicey, and I don't want you getting caught in the crossfire."

"In the what-?" Felix yelped, turning around just in time to see the medbay door slide shut in his face.

"Kicked ya out, huh?" Ralph said from behind him. Felix turned. The waiting room was packed with Calhoun's men, many of whom were nervously polishing their weapons.

"She, uh," Felix gulped. "She seems to know what she's, uh, doing. I think."

"Eh, she'll be okay," Ralph said reassuringly, clapping the little man on the shoulder with one gigantic paw. There was a silence for a moment.

"And...how about you, brother?" Felix asked quietly. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," Ralph said, scratching his stubbly chin. "Yeah, I'll be fine. I'm sure she'll turn up one of these days, you know? I've just gotta keep looking. I'm checking _Street Fighter II _tonight."

"I, er... I thought you said you already looked there?" Felix said diplomatically.

"Well, kind of," Ralph admitted, "but I have to check E. Honda's stage again... I couldn't really do it last time because Chun Li was in the bath, and-"

He yawned broadly.

"I think maybe you should lie down for a while. You don't look too good, Ralph."

"I said I'm fine! Least I can do is be here until the baby comes, and then I'm... then I'm gonna head out again."

Felix didn't say anything. Every day that Vanellope didn't turn up, he was more and more convinced that his wife's suspicions were true, that Vanellope wasn't even in the arcade any more. The soldiers had been all over that new game with their new-fangled doohickeys and had reported finding traces of code near a download port. If that was true-if she was gone-he didn't know how to break it to Ralph. The big man was running himself into the ground looking for her; if he suddenly lost all hope, well, whatever game he was in at the time would probably end up looking like an earthquake hit it.

He would decide how to tell Ralph later, he decided. It wasn't as if he didn't care about that little kid, but right now he could be forgiven for wanting to put off another complication. He was about to become a father, after all.

Calhoun howled from inside the room.

"Er... honey?" Felix called, fruitlessly trying to slide the door back open. "Everything okay in there?"

"Just peachy!" Calhoun shouted back. "I've been in tougher spots-gahh!"

There was a burst of plasma cannon fire, followed by the sounds of medbay equipment falling over.

"Oh, biscuits!" Felix yelped.

The medbay fell silent, and long moments passed.

"Ralph! W-we need to get in there!"

"Sure thing, buddy." Ralph hefted one boulder-like fist. "I'm gonna-"

"_Ralph!_"

"-carefully open it." Ralph placed his palm on the door and forced it upwards with a squeal of angry servos and snapping metal.

The medbay was full of smoke, and several loose tiles dropped from the ceiling. An array of laser sights cut through the clouds, and Felix realized that the assembled space marines were all pointing their rifles into the room.

"J-jiminy jaminy, fellas, is that necessary?"

"Just a precaution, sir," the nearest marine said without taking his eyes off the medbay doors. "Kid's half platformer. Never know what to expect from those crazy hoppers. Uh, no offense or nothin'."

A shadow loomed out of the smoke. All sights converged on it in a thick cluster of red dots, until the smoke parted and Calhoun stepped out. Her face was pale, her blonde hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, but more than anything else, she looked relieved. And a lot less pregnant.

"Drop 'em, ladies," she snapped. "I've just had a ten-course banquet of heck and I've got no room left for dessert. Markowski! Where's my armor?"

"Right here, ma'am, I kept it polished and everything. Er...condition green, then?"

"Condition green," Calhoun agreed, buckling herself into her chestplate. "Ah, it's good to get back into the old girl. A little tighter than I remembered. Cookie!"

One of the marines saluted. "Yes, ma'am?"

"I'm on half-rations until I drop this baby weight." She grinned. "And pass the cigars around, would you? It's a boy."

A round of cheers and back-slapping went around the assembled marines as Cookie opened a jar labeled "DEHYDRATED CIGARS" and began handing out brown pills. Felix waved one away. He was peering curiously into the smoke.

"Er, honey pumpkin?" he asked hesitantly. "Where, er, where exactly _is_ the baby?"

"Hm?" Calhoun said, snapping one of her gauntlet on to her forearm. "Probably goldbricking, as usual."

She raised her voice. "All right, greenhorn! Look sharp! Front and center!"

The smoke parted again, and a blur of movement shot out. Something small and blue bounced around the room several time, careened off one of the overturned computer banks, and finally screeched to a halt right in front of the group. Felix blinked.

"Is...is he...?"

The baby's armor was cobalt blue, and the cap of a Galactic Maintenance Corps worker was jammed backwards on his bulbous head. But his most notable feature was his right arm-or rather, the spot where it should have been. Instead, he sported a wicked-looking cyborg prosthetic made of solid gold and capped off with a pneumatic sledgehammer.

"Er... hello!" Felix said nervously. "I'm... I'm your daddy!"

The baby snapped to attention, his sledgehammer arm dissolving in a shimmer of nanotechnology and reforming as a far more normal-looking, but still golden, arm. "Yes, _sir,_ Daddy, _sir!_ Fix-It Felix the Third reporting for duty!"

"Oh my." Felix turned to Calhoun. "He's... not _really_ a soldier, is he?"

"Specialist Third is the youngest-ever member of the GMC," Calhoun said proudly. "Don't worry. The Corps is mostly infrastructure focused, not front-line combat."

Third grunted, and his arm changed into a golden plasma cannon. "But that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to filling a few jim-jaminnin' bugs full of hot plasma if I get the chance."

Calhoun grinned. "You know something, greenhorn? You're all right."

"Owe it all to you, Sarge. You made me the man I am today."

Felix gulped. Fatherhood was going to take some getting used to.


	6. The President of Monte Cristo

'Come on, come on, there's gotta be a hole_ some_where." Vanellope ran her fingers over the multicolored Haribonium bricks. If they had been the room's only defense, she probably could have glitched through them easily. It was the boundary that was the real problem; the whole room was coated with it, even the ceiling, and it formed a perfect seal.

She'd been going over the same walls for so long that her fingers were raw. She sighed, returned to the middle of the room, and plopped down on the hard floor.

There _had_ to be some way out, but she couldn't think of anything. All she had to work with were bare walls, the clothes on her back, and the cans of jellybeans that were pushed through the slot in the door every few hours. The cheap power-up was enough to keep her going, but not much else. Besides, baked-bean flavored jellybeans were probably about the grossest thing in _Sugar Rush_. Which is probably why the princess was giving them to her.

_Maybe I could dump out the cans and build a kart_... she thought, yanking on the pull tab. That was a laugh. Where was she going to drive? Besides, she only had a few cans. By the time she got enough to make anything bigger than roller skates, Beechwood would be here for sure, rummaging around in her code.

She looked down at the canfull of reddish brown jellybeans. _Stupid! _ Furiously, she tossed it against the wall. It hit with a loud clang, scattering beans everywhere. The room was a huge mess now, but she didn't care. One thing she'd learned from Ralph was that sometimes it felt good just to wreck things.

Thinking about Ralph made her throat hurt. He probably didn't even know what happened to her. And she would never get the chance to tell him. She curled up in the beans and sniffled.

_Squeak, squeak, squeak..._

Vanellope's ears perked up. Something else was in the cell with her. She rolled over, a little frightened, but mostly hopeful. It wasn't like things could get worse, so why not hope they'd get better?

There was a rat in the corner of the cell, picking up the beans and nibbling on them. It eyed her warily, but didn't stop eating.

"Where'd you come from?" Vanellope asked. The rat cocked its head. She crawled over to the corner, noticing a gap between two of the bricks. She'd seen it earlier, but it wasn't as good a find as she'd first thought. It was covered with boundary, so even though it _looked_ open, she couldn't glitch through, or ever put her hand in it. The rat could enter, apparently, probably because it wasn't a player character. Non-player characters weren't blocked by boundary any more than cans of beans were.

"Wish I was a rat," Vanellope muttered, petting its head. It was chocolate, like all the rats in _Sugar Rush_. They were native to Gloyd's haunted house track, but of course they got everywhere and ate everything.

The rat licked her hand. It didn't seem to be afraid of people at all. Vanellope laughed sadly and scratched it on the back.

Hold on. There was something there.

She picked the rat up and looked more closely. There was a little paper flag tied to its back, with a number four neatly written in pink icing.

"Are you somebody's pet?" Vanellope asked. She pulled a chalky valentine's heart from her hair, knocked it against the wall a couple of times to loosen up the powder, and wrote on the flag.

HELP IM IN CELL

She put the rat down, and shooed it into the hole. For several long, nail-biting minutes she wondered if she would ever see it again. Then she saw a wriggling nose poking out of the hole, and scooped the rat up. The number four had been wiped off, but there was new frosting in its place.

ME 2

KNOCK ON WALL

She pounded on the wall above the hole as hard as she could, then put her ear to it. Nothing happened. She took a couple of steps to the right and repeated the process. This time, she heard a faint knocking coming back.

She wiped off the frosting and wrote another note. In this way, she was able to have a slow back and forth conversation.

WHO R U

* * *

RACER

U 2 I BET

V HATES US

* * *

YES, Vanellope wrote back. UR CELL HAS BNDARY?

* * *

NO BUT CANT BREAK WALLS

OTH RACERS NEAR ME

(and, on the other side, in increasingly small writing)

V KIDNPED EVRYBDY ON THIS CNSOLE

2 ELIMIN8 THE CMPTITN

* * *

IF CN GET 2 UR CELL

THINK I CAN ESC, Vanellope wrote. How she was going to do that was another question. She watched the rat squeeze back through the hole and pressed her hand against the invisible barrier. _Forget about being a rat. If I was only an NPC!_

But why shouldn't she be? This wasn't her game. Nobody was controlling her. There wasn't even the ghost of a chance of a player finding her down here. And other than that, what made her different from an NPC? They both used the same code. They were both made of the same polygons. Everyone thought that playable characters were more...solid, somehow, but that wasn't necessarily true; Ralph and Calhoun weren't playable, and they were as real as anyone she'd ever met.

There was no difference. So why couldn't she do it?

It had to be a mental block, she decided. She hadn't always been able to control her glitching, either, but she'd learned. This was just a matter of going one level higher.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. _I have to put the player out of my head. There's no player here_. _I control myself_. She clenched her tiny fists, feeling the pulse of the raw ones and zero that made up her body at the code level. _I control myself._

She jumped, and glitched-

-and smashed against the boundary. She fell back, stunned.

_S'okay. Beginner's jitters. This time I'll get it._

She jumped again, glitched again-crashed again. It was just no good. That wall was _there_, and it felt about as thick as the universe. It didn't give, or dent, or even shudder in the slightest when she hit it. It just sat that, being _impossible_.

She shooed the chirping marshmallow Peeps away from her head and kicked the wall in disgust. Her other foot slipped on the beans which still covered the floor, and she landed on her butt.

"Fudge!" she yelled to nobody in particular. This was worse than spinning out.

...spinning out...

There was something there. Maybe more control _wasn't_ the trick. No matter how perfect her control was, if a player came along, she would surrender that control to them. It was instinct. It's what made her playable.

But there were times when a player couldn't control her, and those were the times when she couldn't control herself. When she spun out. When she crashed. When she fell off the edge of the track. The player could pump the pedals and spin the steering wheel all they wanted, but nothing would happen, because in those moments, there was no connection between the controls and what Vanellope did. The physics engine was operating completely on its own.

In other words, in those moments, Vanellope was an NPC.

She popped open the other cans and poured jellybeans all over the floor. When she'd used them all up, she stood back and admired her handiwork. The cell was completely carpeted.

"All right, Vanellope," she muttered to herself, "get ready to _crash_."

She came at them at a run, glitching up to full speed, and leapt onto the slippery floor. Her feet shot out from under her. Flailing wildly, she bounced, rolled, the wall loomed up in her site and _now now now now now_...

She'd almost expected the boundary to shatter like sugarglass and was a little disappointed when she didn't even feel it. She glitched through it, and the wall, for that matter, as easily as if they were air.

She was still crashing, of course, so her landing wasn't especially dignified. She ended up sprawled on her stomach on the floor.

"Blergh." Vanellope picked herself up and shook off the dust. She looked back the way she'd come and put a hand on the bricks. No boundary. It really had been only her cell that was coated.

"How about that. I broke out of maximum security," she said with a crooked smile. "Sweet."

She turned to look at her neighbor's cell.

"Wow."

They had been here a lot longer than she had. The number of bean tins was enormous. Most of them weren't even opened. This prisoner hadn't been eating them either. They had been _building_ with them.

It was a racetrack, she realized. A racetrack constructed out of thousands and thousands of cans. There were the inner and outer walls, six cans high, and the stands, a hundred or more cans long. She couldn't even begin to calculate how many there were total. The prisoner must have been here for years.

Besides building with cans, they'd also been training rats. The stands were full of them, sitting quietly, just like spectators. A few of them were sporting extra-large foam paws. There were rats on the track, too, lined up along the starting line, each with a number on their back. Only number four was missing.

There was a squeak, and the missing rat ran out from behind the stands and put its paw on her foot. Vanellope picked it up. There was fresh writing on its back.

IF U ESCAPE

COME HELP ME?

Vanellope grinned. "Today's your lucky day, mystery racer, 'cause we're bustin' outta this joint, and we're gonna do it together."

"Oh, thank goodness," said a voice from behind the stands. A pale figure emerged, wiping off the tip of a frosting gun. "You have no-hoh idea, hoo hoo hoo, how long I've been waiting to get out of-"

He froze. For a moment, the two racers stared at each other in shock.

"You!" Vanellope gasped, backing up against the wall.

"_You!_" echoed Turbo.


	7. Escape Plans, Rescue Plans

"Turbo?" Vanellope shrieked. "How did you get here? How are you even _alive!?_"

"Alive, well, of course I'm alive," Turbo laughed nervously, "and I wasn't really trying to escape, hoo hoo, I just didn't realize, you see, that it was you, and I was trying to lure that other prisoner into revealing their plans so that I could tell you all about them and pleeeease don't take away my rats!" He fell on his knees. "Not after I finally managed to train them to wait for the teeny tiny starting pistol!"

Vanellope watched the white-clad racer protectively scooping up armfuls of rats, and realization dawned on her. "You're...not really Turbo, are you? Not the Turbo I knew, I mean."

"I'm whatever Turbo you want!" he said pleadingly. "Your loyal servant for life, a hoo hoo hoo hoo, whether I want to be or not. I can keep my rats, right?"

"You've never been to Litwak's Arcade?" Vanellope asked.

"Well, b-b-b-what's a Litwak's Arcade? I've never been anywhere besides my game and this one and say, Your Highness, did you get shorter, or have I been getting taller?"

"I'm not Your Highness!"

"Now that you mention it, you're not, are you?" He looked at her suspiciously. "Just whose highness are you?"  
"Nobody's! I'm a President! And I come from another _Sugar Rush_ a long way away from here. I'm not the same person as that stuck-up sack of sugar upstairs!"

"Oh. Ohhh. Well, you picked a bad time to visit, a hoo hoo, not that there's ever a good time. This console isn't safe for racers, you know, not safe at all." He frowned, and held up one finger. "One time! Just one time, my game got played and I got to race, and then _she_, she got jealous, she extended me a friendly invitation and pop! Into the dungeon with old Turbo. Princess Vanellope-that's the Vanellope from around here, I mean, present company excluded, of course-she thinks she should be the only one allowed to race. And she's willing to step on anyone and do just about anything to get what she wants. Have you ever known anyone so, so selfish?"

Vanellope's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, one guy."

"Well, I certainly hope you punched him right in the snoot!" Turbo set the rats carefully back in the stands. "Now, let's get out of here. Can you pull me through the wall with that...flickery ghosty thing you did, or do I have to wait for you to go find some keys or something?"

Vanellope looked around. "Hmm... y'know, I never tried pulling someone along with me. I know it works on my car, but I dunno if it'd work on another person. You might get stuck into the wall or somethin'"

"You won't leave me in here!" Turbo said, looking shocked.

"I..." Vanellope bit her lip. "Nah. I said I'd get you out, and I will. But then we go our separate ways, deal?"

"Of course, hoo hoo, if that's what you want."

"And I mean I'm gettin' everybody out. Where's the other racers?"

Turbo pointed at the opposite wall. "There are more cells on the other side. But the man in the next cell... I don't know about him. He's not very friendly."

"Who is he?"

"Well, a racer, but I don't know his name. He said it was proprietary information and he wouldn't give it out for free, and he _refused_ to accept free tickets to the Squeaky Derby. A very disagreeable man." He pointed to dank rathole in the wall and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Sometimes the rats don't come back. I think he's _eating_ them."

"Hold on." Vanellope glitched away in a flicker of azure light.

"Hoosh," Turbo sighed to himself. "The way she acts, you'd think _I_ was the one with an evil twin."

Rat Number 7 squeaked.

"I heard that, Alphonse! And I suppose _your_ family tree is nothing but... but magnolias and tangelos! Hmmph." He crossed his arms. "_Rats._ Always so judgemental."

Another blue flicker lit the cell and Vanellope was back, smiling broadly.

"Do you know who's living right next door to you?" she asked.

"No, no... what? I already said I didn't. What does it matter, anyway?"

"It matters," said Vanellope, "because now I know how we're getting out of here!"

* * *

"We've discovered the target's most likely location," Calhoun said, gesturing to the large holographic display floating in the air above the War Room's long table. The interior of Litwak's Arcade was rendered in blocks of blue light, with the electronic paths between games glowing an eye-catching green.

"Where?" Ralph asked, standing up and trying to move one of the virtual game cabinets aside. He was new to holograms. "I've been over every pixel of ground twice and I haven't-"

"That's because there's a fly in the nano-salve." Calhoun gestured, and the hologram zoomed far out, becoming a map of the city surrounding Litwak's. "Our best intel is that she's _here_." She tapped a finger on a tiny house on the opposite side of the map.

Ralph climbed onto the table, wading through the simulation, and tried to peer into the house. "Uh, I don't see her. How are you figuring this?"

Calhoun nodded to one of her marines, who were jammed shoulderpad-to-shoulderpad in every chair around the table except those taken by Ralph, Felix, and the baby. "Reilly! Show them."

The marine stood up and hefted a heavy-looking metal cylinder with tapered ends onto the table. Calhoun tapped it with one armored finger. "This is the X37 Municipal-Class Probe, capable of traveling more than five miles over standard electrical wiring. Using these babies, we've mapped out most of the city's electrical grid, including all known gaming platforms."

She swept a hand across the map, and thousands of golden dots appeared like a field of stars.

"Jiminy jaminy," Felix breathed. "Are _all_ of those arcades?"

"Negative, sweetie. Most of these are home consoles, computer equipment, and the last known locations of game-friendly mobile devices. The lab coats upstairs say we have around eighty, eighty-five percent in our data banks."

"Pfft," said Fix-It Felix the Third.

Calhoun turned to him. "You have something to say, greenhorn?"

"Nothing important, Sarge," the grizzled baby growled. "Just doesn't sit right with me, the idea of those eggheads blowing taxpayers credits on this probe bullroar, when we all know what they should be focusing on." He patted his golden arm, currently in the form of a thermonuclear rocket cannon.

Calhoun's eyes narrowed. "There's more to war than whipping out your weapons and seeing whose is bigger, greenhorn. But then, I guess you're too young to remember the Battle of Sugar Rush. You haven't seen what Cybugs can do when introduced to a beacon-free enviroment. Well, let me make something clear to you right now. If a probe can travel through the grid, we have to assume a Cybug egg can too."

She stood over Third and bent down, looking him right in the eye. "And if that ever happens, one egg could bring down the entire system. All it would take was one arcade, one console, _somewhere_, to fall to the bugs, and that would be it." She swept her arm across the map, and the lights blinked out. "Worlds we can't even imagine, overrun and devoured in minutes."

Third frowned. He stood up, took his pacifier out of his mouth, dropped it on the floor, and ground it under his heel. "Are you suggesting I'd let some filthy bug just waltz by on my watch, Sarge? That any man here would? Is that what you're saying?"

"What made you think I was talking about us?" Calhoun snapped. "Do you know how many iterations of _Hero's Duty_ exist in this city alone?"

"Er, I-"

"Five hundred and thirteen. That we know of. And if _any one_ of those has an outbreak..." She let the words hang in the air.

Third stared right back at her. "Then bring 'em on. Just more bugs for me to shoot."

"Not a smart attitude, greenhorn. It's hotheads like you that end up with the enemy wearing your faces. Well, you can just go sit in the corner until you're ready to be a grown up and accept the realities of a combat situation."

Third turned to Felix. "Daddy! Sarge is being mean to me."

"Ahh..." Felix said, looking a little shell-shocked. "I...I think you'd better do what Mommy asks."

Third frowned, kicked the table with one armored booty, and stomped off to the corner of the War Room, where a little wooden stool awaited him.

"He's a good kid," Calhoun mused, "but he's a loose cannon. Thinks just because he tap-danced his way through basic training, he's invincible."

"W-well, he'll grow out of it," Felix suggested.

"Er," Ralph spoke up, "so, uh, doomsday's nice and all, but what does this have to do with Vanellope? You said you could find her!"

"We have found her," Calhoun explained, reactivating the map. "The probes can be calibrated to ping certain code signatures. Mine, for instance; whenever it finds my code on a particular platform, we know there's a copy of _Hero's Duty_ there. We've been mapping other games, too. As soon as I knew Vanellope wasn't in the arcade-"

"'As soon as you knew'?" Ralph roared, bringing his massive fists down on the table. "Well, you never got around to telling _me!_ You're mean you've known, for, for how long that-"

"Do you want to hear where she is, or not?" Calhoun shot back. "Yes? Then sit those oversized hairy ham hocks down in that chair and _listen_."

Ralph deflated. "Uh, yeah. Sorry. I do." He pulled his hands out of the fist-shaped dents in the table with an audible _pop_.

"Good. Now, we added Vanellope's code to the search list; lucky for us, her unique code structure means we can tell her apart any other Vanellopes out there. Yesterday we received a positive reading from a home console five klicks away. There's no _Hero's Duty_ on that machine, so I can't contact my counterpart for confirmation, but we're ninety-seven percent confidant that-"

"That's great!" Ralph said, jumping up. "That means we just have to go along this green line here, right? And through this other green stuff, and along here, and we can go straight to her!"

"Negative. This isn't the same as zipping off to Game Central Station and back; we're talking over a thousand times that distance. A person can't go that far over the wires. Your code...degrades." She grimaced. "It's not pretty."

"Well, still, I gotta try!"

"Hold your hoverbikes, Ralph, there's no need for a suicide run just yet. We can get to her. We know every game on that console, thanks to the probe, and it just so happens there's one that exists both there _and_ in Litwak's."

"B-but, sugar burgers," Felix spoke up, "just because there's another version of one of our games doesn't mean we can get to it, does it?"

"Yeah, I dunno," Ralph shrugged. "I still think the wires'll be okay if I just run real fast."

"Would you two clean the brick dust out of your ears? I didn't say 'two copies of the same game'. It's the _same game_. We can enter it here and leave it there."

Ralph scratched his head. "Never heard of games being connected like that before."

"Because you boys are from the Eighties. This game's online."

"Wait, are you talking about that goofy fantasy thing the security guy is always playing on that little tiny console?"

"That 'tiny console' is a laptop computer, not to mention our ticket into _Empire of Questing_." Calhoun crossed her arms. "It's time to get medieval."


	8. Career Counseling

"Halt!" said the guard. "Beyond this gate lies the_ Empire of Questing_. State your name and your reason for seeking passage into the realm."

"My name is Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun. This is my husband Felix and his work enemy, Ralph. Our mission is simple: there's a little girl who's lost and we're going to find her."

The guard stamped his armor-clad foot, and he and his fellow guard crossed their swords across the entrance. "Entry most emphatically _not _granted. Good day!"

Calhoun rested one hand on her plasma pistol. "Mind telling us why not?"

"Because," the guard snapped, lifting his visor to reveal a glowering expression, "this is not some lazy, backwater _arcade game_. This is _Empire of Questing. _We have players on in every area of the game world, twenty-four hours a day, and we can't have the locals wandering in and interfering with them. Got it?"

"We don't want to interfere," Felix hastily said. "We're in a hurry anyway. It'll just be a quick pop in and pop out. We won't talk to anybody!"

"I'd listen to the short, handsome guy if I were you," Calhoun said.

"I'm sorry, but we have our orders," snapped the guard, and slammed his visor shut again.

Ralph stepped forward. "Wait, wait, wait, I've heard about these things. One of these guys always tells the truth and one of them always lies, right? So which one of you is the liar?"

"I assure you, sir, we are both truthful!" the guard said.

"Ah, this guy's the liar," Ralph said. "So we ask the other guy how to get in-uhm, wait, no, is that how it works? Hold on."

"I'm going to have to ask the three of you to vacate the premises," the guard said.

"Or what, tin grin?" Calhoun growled.

"Or be slain!" the guard retorted.

"Look, pal, if you think I'm gonna pee my powersuit over a few threats from a glorified doorman..."

"How dare you?" the guard bellowed, brandishing his sword. "My weapon speaks to my record! Scarred and pitted, cracked from a hundred battles, it-"

"I can fix it."

"Hmm?" the guard said, looking down. "What was that?"

"I said," Felix repeated with a gentle smile. "I can fix those swords for you, good as new. I'll even throw in a free dent removal on your armor. What do you say, boys? A favor for a favor?"

The guards put their helmeted heads together and muttered quietly.

"Show us," said one, holding out his sword. Felix tapped it with his hammer, and instantly the dulled blade was sharp and shiny again. He beat a quick tattoo on the guards' armor-breastplates, gauntlets, pauldrons, greaves-and every dent and patch of rust disappeared.

"Now that's not a bad job," the guard admitted, his counterpart nodding in approval. "I'm afraid we still can't let you past, though. Rules are rules, you know."

"Well, that's okay, never mind then, if you'd rather not make a deal we can just put all those dents right back in, can't we?" Ralph said cheerfully, cracking his knuckles.

Calhoun nodded. "I think that can be arranged."

"Wait!" the guard said, looking at Ralph's boulder-sized fists. "Maybe... maybe it's okay if you keep your heads down and just run through. If anyone asks, you're players like anyone else."

"Sure, why not?" Ralph said.

"And you'll have to leave..." The guard eyed Calhoun's small armory of plasma weapons. "...your...advanced equipment here. And go through character creation-just like everyone else, you know!"

Ralph scratched his head. "Character... creation?"

The guarded nodded. "Nothing to it. Just answer the questions. Easy as pie."

* * *

"Character name?" asked the pleasant voice. It boomed all around the softly lit, cylindrical chamber.

"Calhoun."

The word _Kalhoon_ appeared on the wall in glowing gold script. Calhoun shrugged. "Close enough for Terran Admistrative Oversight Committee work."

"Would you like to make any adjustments to physical appearance-"

"No. Let's hurry up here. I want to meet back up with the others."

"You said you wanted to adjust 'other'. Please select what you wish to adjust! a) Elbow sharpness b) Tattoos c) Horns or wings-"

"No adjustments!" Calhoun punched the wall. "Fronking A.I.s.! The same no matter where you go."

She was an A.I. herself, of course, but that was different. The ones that _looked_ like computers always acted so _literally_.

"Please answer a few questions. This will help us determine what class would fit you best."

"Okay. Go."

The computer proceeded to ask her several fairly basic questions about tactics, command, and combat roles. Questions that, Calhoun thought, would have been fairly easy for the greenest grunt fresh off the ship from any backwater farming planet you could name. She kept expecting them to get harder, but instead the series ended.

"You combine strong leadership skills with the ability to go toe-to-toe with the largest opponents. Your suggested class is 'Knight'!" the computer said. A picture formed on the wall of a colossus plated with gleaming armor than bristled with spikes. "Is this okay?"

"Yes," Calhoun said, a little relieved. She'd had to leave her equipment behind, and she felt so naked going into an unfamiliar situation in nothing more than her undershirt and leggings. At least now she knew this 'Empire' had its own kind of power armor.

A massive broadsword dropped from the ceiling, impaling itself into the floor. A moment later, a couple of thin strips of chain dropped down next to it. Calhoun picked one of them up.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding," she said in disgust. "Is this supposed to be my armor? Doesn't exactly match the picture, does it?"

"The picture shows the Knight starting armor model for men. That is the Knight starting armor model for women."

Calhoun rattled the chain. "This wouldn't stand up to a high wind. I want the other one."

"Both models have an equivalent armor rating and provide the same degree of protection. Only the appearance is different."

"And I get that protection as long as I'm wearing it?"

"Yes."

"Fine," Calhoun snorted. She tied the armor around her head like a bandanna.

* * *

"Character name?"

"Uh, Fix-It Felix Jr."

"_No hyphens or punctuation_," said the voice sternly.

"Oh! Well, then, just Felix."

PHELICKS appeared on the wall.

"Would you like to make any adjustments to physical appearance?"

"Oh, no, I'm happy the way I am, Miss Computer! No changes here!"

"You said you wanted to adjust 'beard'! Please state the type of-"

"No, no!" Felix said. "I don't want any changes at all! My goodness, you're pushy!"

"You have selected 'bushy'!"

A bushy brown beard sprouted on Felix's face. He gave it an experimental tug. It felt pretty real.

"Jih-" he began, and clapped a hand over his mouth. Who knows how the computer would interpret 'Jiminy Jaminy'.

"Please answer a few questions," said the computer. "This will help us determine what class would fit you best."

"All... all right."

"In battle, do you prefer to fight from up close, or from a distance?"

"Jim-I mean- gosh! I'm not much for battles at all. I'm a fixer, not a fighter. I just repair things."

The lights went up, and confetti poured from the ceiling, followed by a white robe, which floated down, billowing, and draped itself over Felix like a parachute. An oak staff followed, clattering to the floor.

"Congratulations!" beamed the voice happily. "You have been selected for the critically in-demand healing role of the Cleric! Is this okay? Please say yes."

"Yes!" Felix said, his voice muffled by several layers of cloth and beard.

* * *

"Please answer a few questions. This will help us determine what class would fit you best."

"Fire away."

"In battle, do you prefer to fight from up close, or from a distance?"

"Up close and personal, every time!" Ralph said, pounding one fist into the other.

"Do you enjoying buffing team members?"

"Uh, I don't know what that is. Next."

"Do you enjoying using crowd control to simplify battles?"

"Next."

"Do you like being able to shift to another role when-"

"Look, uh, I really dunno anything about this game," Ralph said. "The only thing I'm good at is wrecking stuff. But I'm really, _really_ good at that. I just want a class that lets me get in there and wreck as much stuff as I can as fast and possible!"

"You enjoy doing high damage at close range!" said the computer. "Your suggested class is 'rogue'. Is this okay?"

"Rogue," Ralph repeated. "Yeah. Yeah, I like that! It says 'I'm a bad guy-but with _style_!' That's perfect!"

A suit of leather armor dropped from the ceiling; amazingly, it actually fit him. If it had been more than just computer code, it would have taken a whole herd of cows. The dark, studded material was soft and pliable, but tough enough that it might help him out if he took a punch or two. It was just the sort of thing a stylish bad guy _should _wear.

A portal slid open in the wall and Ralph stepped forward happily. "Ow!" Something had just jabbed into his bare foot. He ran a hand over the sole and felt a couple of splinters, which he yanked out.

They were knives. Teeny, tiny, pointy stilettos. He could just barely hold them between his thumb and forefinger.

"Huh," he shrugged. "Maybe I can use 'em for toothpicks."

And with that, Ralph the two-fisted rogue strode forth into _Empire of Questing._

* * *

The guards were still admiring their shiny new armor when the next traveller came along.

"Halt!" said the first one, when he saw the little figure. "Beyond this gate lies the-"

The figure's arm erupted into a geyser of glowing sparks, and the guards heard the buzzing of a million bees in their ears, and their armor and weapons evaporated like ice in a frying pan.

"We are disarmed!" the first guard wailed.

"And disclothed!" the second one cried, trying to cover his heart-patterned boxer shorts. "We yield! We yield!"

"I'm not gonna hurt you, you sniveling wimps," said the figure. "Just stand down and let me through."

"B-but-"

"I said stand down! There's a job to do, and I intend to do it, whether Sarge likes it or not!" growled Fix-It Felix the Third, the golden nanobots in his arm reforming once again into the semblance of a normal limb. "Nobody puts baby in the corner!"


	9. The WAAshank Redemption

"Ah, Professor Beechwood. Welcome to my _glooooo_rious palace!" Vanille 2k said, lounging on her throne and looking down at the little old man in front of her.

"Thank you, Princess," Professor Beechwood said politely, bobbing slightly. "Er, you'll forgive me if I don't kneel, I hope, bad knees, you know."

"No matter. Rancis! Minty! Bring in the sprouts!"

Two figures in plastic haz-mat suits scuttled in, carrying a silver tray, and presented it to Beechwood. He lifted the cover, revealing a pile of something round and green.

"Brussels sprouts?"

"I had them imported," Vanille 2k said, beaming. "I hear they're a delicacy to adults. You love them, of course."

"Er..." Beechwood started. The sprouts were rubbery and cold, and smelled like they'd been overcooked far past the line of stinkiness.

"_You love them, of course!_" the princess said threateningly.

"Of course!" Beechwood said, picking up a sprout and popping it into his mouth. _Remember her storied mercurial nature, Alphonse, we mustn't upset the locals. _"N-now, Your Majesty, if I may..."

"And don't talk with your mouth full! You're in the presence of royalty, for sugar's sake."

Beechwood swallowed the nasty, sulphurous lump. "Ah. Yum yum."

"That's better. Now, what were you going to ask me?"

"I merely wanted to inquire about the-the subject."

"The impostor, you mean? The u-slurper?"

"Usurp-" Beechwood began automatically, and then shut his mouth. _Now, now, old boy, you know how this sort hates being corrected. That's how you talked your way right out of tenure at Pearlescent Town U. A little more diplomacy!_

"The u-slurper, yes... may I see her? Is she secure? I'd like to begin preliminary testing as soon as possible."

"Oh, she's quite secure, all right. I've sealed her up down in the vaults. And I _am_ pleased to see your enthusiasm. Who knows, we could be done by dinnertime!"

"Ah, well, it may take a good deal longer than that," Beechwood said, taking out his handkerchief. "A discovery of this magnitude... the amount of data to collect, you know, not to mention the time it will take to establish a rapport with the subject. She certainly won't be inclined to trust us at first, oh no, due to the... rather unfortunate circumstances under which she was, errhum, recruited."

"What are you talking about?" Vanille 2k frowned. "Establishing a rapport...? I just need to you get in there and-"

The palace shook. Beechwood tottered on his feet, struggling to stand up as the floor shuddered beneath him. The princess slid off her throne with an angry squeal. There was a clatter as the servants dropped the tray, sending Brussels sprouts rolling across the throne room floor.

"My goodness," the Professor said, steadying himself. "What was that?"

"What _was_ that, Tom?" the princess said, adjusting her crown, which had fallen over one eye.

"I'll find out," General Atomic F. Bill. "In the meantime, remain calm. We're fully prepared in the case of enemy attack."

"Enemy attack?" Beechwood yelped. "Just who do you expect to be attacking you? I'm out of my game, you know, I can't be here when-"

The palace shook again, and this time they could hear the explosion, a concussive blast that shook the walls. Cocoa dust drifted down from the ceiling.

"Princess, you'd better get to the bunker," the general began, but Vanille 2k shoved him out of the way, storming across the cracked tiles to the royal balcony.

"Bunker, shmunker," she snarled. "I want to see who out there is _stupid_ enough to attack my castle!"

They crowded out onto the balcony-even Beechwood's natural curiosity overcame his terror-and looked down at the foothills below the castle. Billowing clouds of powdered sugar poured out of a gaping hole in the hillside, and the lower slopes were covered with chunks of half-melted chocolate.

"She's escaped!" gasped Vanille 2k. "I don't know how that little muffin-muncher did it, but she's escaped!"

"No," the general said, lowering his mirrored glasses and narrowing his eyes. There were at least a dozen shapes moving around in the swirling sugar mist. "_They've_ escaped. All the racers."

"Just h-how many people were you keeping down there?" Beechwood asked nervously, but the others ignored him. Vanille 2k was fuming with rage.

"The impostor thinks she can ruin _all_ my hard work, does she? I'm done being nice! Get me my kart and I'll run her down myself!" She snapped her sceptre in two. "She'll nothing but a smear of strawberry jam on the pavement by the time I'm done with her!"

"Princess, you can't!" General Bill warned.

"Don't tell me I can't! I am your _princess!_"

"But the direction they're traveling-they'll be heading into the Salty Marsh," the general pointed out. "The terrain is impassable to karts!"

"Then ready Project P."

"Project-" The general was taken aback. "But...over _this?_"

"Do it!" Vanille 2k snapped. "I'm not letting her get away."

"Yes, Princess." He saluted and marched away, muttering under his breath. "Now's as good a time as any for a field test..."

* * *

"Daylight!" Vanellope cheered, as golden beams of sun slanted through the dusty, powderized remains of half a mountainside. "We're out!"

A cheer went up from the other imprisoned racers, but it quickly turned into a chorus of coughs.

"Yeah, you might wanna breathe through your shirts until the air clears a little," Vanellope said. "Wario, my man, you outdid yourself with that last one."

"WAA-HAA-HAA!" Wario laughed, ripping open another can of jellybeans and pouring them into his hippopotamus-sized maw. "Nobody outfarts-a Waaaario when you give heem the proper fuel! Ha ha!"

"Just keep that thing pointed away from everyone else, big guy. Okay, we don't have much time before they come lookin' for us, so everyone make a break for it! She can't catch all of us, and she'll mostly be lookin' for me anyway! Good luck!"

Racers streamed out of the hole and down the boulder-strewn slope-Samurai Goroh, Crash Bandicoot, chocobos of every color. It seemed like nearly every racer on the console had fallen prey to Vanille 2k's dungeon.

"Aren't you coming, Wario?" Vanellope asked. "We never would have gotten out if it wasn't for you!"

"Wario's is-a not going to leave while there's treasure to be snatched! He's going to stay here and blast hees way into the other vaults!" Wario chortled, twirling his jagged mustache as he turned and walked back into the darkness of the now-devastated cell complex. "Waa haa haa!"

"Suit yourself," Vanellope said. "And good luck with the farting."

"Waa haa haa! Wario doesn't need-a luck!"

Vanellope darted down the slope towards the foggy wetlands. The smell of salt hung heavy in the air here, replacing the usual sugary atmosphere with something sharper. Thick patchs of saltwater taffy bubbled just beneath the water's surface, ready to suck down the unwary, and thick strings of popcorn hung from the branches of the pretzal mangroves. Vanellope glitched from one thick mat of twisted roots to another, crossing the swamp without getting her feet wet.

"Excuse me! Little girl! Oh, excuse me!"

Vanellope turned to see Turbo splashing through the waist-deep water. As she watched, he tripped over something and went down, burbling.

_He's gonna drown himself if I don't pull him out_, she sighed, and glitched back to haul the ghostly-pale racer out of the marsh.

"Oh, thank you, thank you very-"

"Forget it, now be more careful! I can't be waitin' around for you!"

"B-but, but I thought we were friends," Turbo said.

"Only until we got out, I said," Vanellope snapped. "Look, you seem nice and all but it's sorta a personal thing, okay? No offense."

"Well, if you say so, young lady. I'm just happy to be out of the rat race, a hoo hoo."

"Good, well, go carefully and stay outta sight and maybe you'll stay that way!" Vanellope guided him onto a patch of firmer ground.

"I'll do my-" But she was gone already. "My best, hoo hoo. Well, wasn't she in a hurry."

* * *

She could see the mountainous entrance to Sugar Rush in the distance, a hulking shape through the clouds. The sky was gray and gloomy here, and her eyes stung from the salt mist, but nevertheless Vanellope was happy. She was almost home free!

Well, not _home_, exactly, she reflected. There was still the matter of being trapped on a foreign game system to contend with. But she would think about that when she got back to the menu channel. She was sure she'd come up with something. Funny, how much more hopeful everything seemed when you weren't locked in a dungeon; even the darkening sky couldn't get her down.

That was odd-it _was_ getting darker. Vanellope had learned, from her travels around the arcade, that some games weren't bright all the time, that some didn't have suns and others had suns which were there sometimes and sometimes not. But _Sugar Rush _was always bright and sunny, except for a few special areas like Gloyd's haunted house. Was she heading into one of those now?

A moment later, she got her answer as thousands of bright lights exploded into glaring existence above her head. She covered her eyes, blinded by the powerful beams, and staggered to a halt.

"Did you really think you could get away from me?" sneered a voice Vanellope recognized as her own. Her heart sank.

"Stay where you are and don't even _think_ of moving!" commanded the voice. It sounded like it was coming over an amplifier. "Unless, of course, you'd care to find out exactly how many peppermint-shard railguns are pointed right at your scruffy little head!"

"Zero?" Vanellope yelled up hopefully.

"Wh-no! _Lots!_"

"Aw, too bad. I was hopin' for zero." Vanellope squinted up at the enormous shape hanging overhead. The lights had burned off most of the mist, but it was hard to get a sense of what the thing was; all she could see from here were the lights, multicolored and painfully bright, and behind them, a vast dark shape, blotting out the sky. And descending from it, underscoring the hugeness of the shape itself, a small platform carrying three tiny figures. The princess, the general, and the professor, stark black silhoettes against the rainbow-colored confusion.

"Please, j-just come along nicely!" Beechwood cried down. "There's really no need for this. I'm rather sorry about the, er, the rough treatment, but we really do just want to study you. It's very important, you know! For science!"

"Science can kiss my sweet gumdrop _butt!_" Vanellope yelled. "I said no before, and if havin' Little Miss Completely Nutter-Butters In The Head throw me in prison was your idea of encouragin' me to cooperate then _you_ need to work on learning how to ask politely!"

"Railguns are standing by, Princess!" General Bill barked.

"Thank you, General," Vanille 2k said, drawing a wicked-looking pink pistol out of a pouch on her belt. "But I prefer the personal touch. You know, with a decent headshot, this cotton candy gun can suffocate the target in _seconds_."

"Ha! Like you're really gonna use that!" Vanellope laughed. "It's not like I'm much good to you dead, am I? I'll just disappear! So you might as well give up threatenin' to shoot me!"

Vanille 2k's face twisted for a moment into a murderous expression, then she shrugged. "Very well, have it your way. I'm not going to shoot you."

"Thank goodness," Beechwood said. "Now, I'm sure there's a peaceful way to arrange-"

"I'm going to shoot _him_," Vanille 2k continued, jamming the barrel of the cotton candy gun against Beechwood's temple.

"Eh-uhm, what?" the old scientist stammered. "Hold on just one minute, now, I don't believe that was the agreement-"

"Oh, _do_ shut up," Vanille 2k said, rolling her eyes as she wrapped her other arm around his neck and pulled him into a headlock.

"But you need me too!" Beechwood gasped. "I'm the only one who knows enough about the ancient Arcadians-"

"I don't care one thin Skittle about the ancient whoevers. I just want her code. Any old scientist can get me that."

"B-but-"

"Now, surrender, Vanellope! Or I'll paint this old fossil _pink!_"

"I-I don't care!" Vanellope said, crossing her arms. "Why should I? He's the one who wants to experiment on me."

"Oh, I think you do care. Your game is part of our history, after all, and frankly, everybody knows the _old _Vanellope was too much of a sweetie-pie softie to let a poor old man get his head puffed off right in front of her."

"I am not!"

"We'll see about-oh, and what's this?" Vanille 2k noticed Beechwood's hand reaching under his waistcoat, and tightened her hold. "Tom! See what our friend here was reaching for."

The general ripped open Beechwood's waistcoat, sending a shower of gleaming brass buttons flying off into the night. Beneath it, twin bandoliers of glass vials crossed the old man's chest. "Minimon, Princess. Dozens of them. All over level 70."

"So! Trying to smuggle an army into my kingdom? Naughty, naughty."

"Wasn't... going to... use them... always carry... self-defense..." Beechwood choked.

"And look how well _that_ worked out!" Vanille 2k giggled. "Well, this makes things easier, doesn't it, my dear little shrimplet? If you don't surrender, I'll smash every one of these bottles underfoot. Could you _really_ let all these innocent battle monsters give their lives for you?"

"I-" Vanellope began. "I-I can't, b-but if I go with you, you'll-"

Vanille 2k yawned. "I'm getting bored. Make up your mind, fast, or it's _mazel tov_ time."

Vanellope hung her head. "Okay. I surrender. I guess I gotta."

"Excellent! Tom, lower a Twizzler." Vanille 2k smirked. "And as for you, Professor, when we get back to the castle I'd rather not hear any nonsense about studying her, _if_ you please. You're not here to _study_. You're here to _dissect_."

* * *

The vast shadow had gone, and the sounds of swamp life resumed. The reeds parted, and a figure, white jumpsuit dark with smears of chocolate mud, emerged.

"Oh, dear," Turbo said sadly. "You saved me, and it would only be right for me to return the favor. But, but I don't know how, hoo hoo. I just don't know how."

And with his hoo-hoos fading into soft sobs, he continued to slog through the swamp.


	10. At the Sign of the Slain Rat

"Welcome ter the Slain Rat, travelers," the grizzled old barkeep rumbled. "Shake the dust off yer boots and let me get yer a pull of the finest ale from here to Crestgrove. Plenty of work in town, if yer lookin' fer a bit of coin. I hear tell Old Grimesby needs someone to clear the vermin out o' his fields, and Shyla the Arrow-Wright is tradin' a fine bow fer a bit o' assistance in procurin' yew-wood. Now, mind you stay well clear o' the forest. Dark things abroad these days. Dark things indeed."

His rheumy eyes drifted in opposite direction, seeming to take the shadowy tavern's entire crowded interior in at once.

"Spare us the flavor text, old man," Calhoun said. "We need to find the exit onto a specific console. We have some identifying information, so as long as we can get to some sort of central hub-"

The barkeep's pupils snapped forward. "Oh! Excuse me! I didn't realize you were, you know, people. I thought you were _players_. We don't get many visitors in _Empire of Questing_, what with the lack of downtime. Here, I'll get you the real stuff."

He shoved the battered mugs down the bar, and pulled a bottle from under the counter. "Now, this is a treat. Sir Ellingsworth Barq's Private Reserve, 1884. Would the lady like to sniff the cork?"

"No root beer," Calhoun said. "We need to stay sharp."

"I'll take a chocolate milk, please," Felix asked politely, "if-if you've got it, that is."

"And I'll take mine straight," Ralph said. "Or whatever you've got. Just good to get off the old feet for a minute, you know?"

He plopped heavily down one on of the long benches, launching two gnomelings, three shrimplets, and a mostly-naked elf towards the rafters. "Oops. Sorry. Little crowded in here."

"Are these _all_ players?" Felix asked in a whisper. "All at once?"

"Not all of them, no," the bartender said. "A few of them are here to hand out quests, but most of our clientele are level 1s and 2s, a few 3s, maybe. Players start them up to roleplay or try out different classes and usually only play them once. You can't get out of Neophyte's Glen until you beat the bandits in the cave, so most of them end up hanging out here, selling their starting equipment for root beer money."

"Jiminy jaminy, that sure is one heck of a raincloud at the picnic," Felix said, looking over the throngs of fantasy creatures. Humans, dwarves, orcs; whatever their race, most of them were wearing identical-looking cheap peasant clothes and carrying nothing more fearsome than wooden sticks.

"Selling their equipment, huh?" Calhoun ran her eyes over the crowd, picking out a fairly slim young man in a complete set of plate. "Hey, you! You're about my size. How would you like to make fifty Terran Alliance credits?"

"Would I!"

"Taking advantage of the less fortunate?" Ralph muttered. "Isn't that a little heartless?"

"I'd rather be heartless than half-naked, especially when we don't know what's ahead. This is a serious mission, solider. Toughen up."

"Just think you oughta give a little thought to how your actions are gonna affect others, that's all," Ralph shrugged. Behind him, one of the launched gnomelings finally succeeded in extricating her head from the ceiling.

"There a changing room in this place?" Calhoun asked, gathering up her new acquisition.

"There's a powder room in the back, but there _is_ a family of trolls living in it."

Calhoun shrugged. "It'll do."

While the sergeant changed, Ralph and Felix prodded the bartender for more information.

"So there was sort of probe thing, and it took some readings of the system we're looking for," Ralph said, pulling a wrinkled scrap of paper of his pocket. "Uh, I hope these numbers help. Let's see, we're looking for uh, system number XA-145527, and they had _Empire of Questing_ account number 891145654J, character name, ahhh, Scourgica Slayhaven. Does that ring any bells?"

The bartender barked laughter. "Excuse my rudeness, friend, but do you know how many people play this game? There are over fifteen million accounts. Considering canceled accounts and alternate characters, I must have seen, oh, about forty-five million people across this bar. I'll need more than a name if you want me to remember one specific person."

"Hold on, there's a description. Uh, says here she's kind of tall, dark hair-"

"Oh, _her! _ Yeah, I know her." The bartender nodded. "Used to come in here once in a while; haven't seen her in ages, though. Lives in player housing in Windharrow, I think."

"Windharrow?"

"The capitol. Turn right on the road outside and take the pass to Birchgrove. Just a quick train ride from there. Oh, and mind you don't trip over the gnomelings on the way out."

* * *

As soon as Calhoun returned from the powder room, looking a lot more like her old heavily-armored self in her new suit of full plate, the party set off along the road. Neophyte's Glen was a sprawling, sun-dappled expanse of orchards and vineyards, dotted with charming little cottages and bursting with wildflowers. Starting characters frolicked in the verdant fields, gleeful using their rusty swords and wooden clubs to bash Level 1 evil bunnies and daisy imps into paste.

But a closer look revealed something darker behind this seemingly innocent bunny slaughter. The smiles were forced, the brows creased with worry, and the battle cries tinged with desperation. One look across the field, to where the numerous abandoned Level 1s and 2s squatted in their endless shantytowns of tents and lean-tos, was enough to reveal the source of their concern.

A skinny elf girl with tangled hair and a smudgy face called out to them as they passed by the bush she was squatting under. "Hey! Silver piece? Potion?"

"Uh, sorry," Ralph said, patting down his leather armor. "I don't think this came with any stuff."

"What about you, kind gnomeling wizard?" The elf looked at Felix with dewy eyes. "A high-level guy like you outta be able to conjure all kinds of great food. Way better than the stale bread we get around here. Make me a cupcake?"

"Er," Felix said uncomfortably, "I'm not really the, uh, conjuring kind of wizard. But I think I have a spare pie around here somewhere."

He pulled a pixelated pastry out of his robe and the elf inhaled it happily, licking boysenberry sauce off of her lips. "Mmm! Peach! Can you do another one?"

"I can't-well, I suppose there's our supplies, but I don't know if-"

"Pleeeeeeease?"

"Negative," Calhoun said, stepping in. "We need those."

"But-but Sugar Pumpkin, look how hungry she is!"

"If we give away all our food here, _we'll_ be the hungry ones when the time comes to retrieve Vanellope. You want to take that risk?"

"Well, well, no, but-"

"There's thousands of people here!" She sighed. "I'm sorry, honey. But our friend here is just going to have to level up on her own."

"I can't level up on my own!" the elf wailed. "Experience only counts if you earn it with a player, and I can't get through the bandit cave at level 1, so I'm _stuck_ here!"

"Then follow us," Ralph suggested. "We're probably gonna have to trash those bandits anyway, right? Just stay back out of boulder range."

"It doesn't work like that," the girl said sadly. "Everyone fights the bandit chief on their own. It's a tutorial." Her head drooped. "And you can't get through it at level 1. I've tried a lot. You just get killed and dumped back at the starting area."

"That's important information," Felix observed. "I think that's worth a pie, right?"

"Honey, no. Your heart is in the right place, but if you keep giving those out, other people are going to notice. We'll be mobbed. And we can't help _everyone_. Come on, we're wasting time." Calhoun turned and started off again down the dusty road.

"Well, maybe I can't help everyone," Felix murmured. "But at least help _you._"

He reached into his inventory and pulled out the blueberry pie he'd been saving for lunch. He was about to hand it over when an image leapt unbidden into his head. Vanellope, imprisoned by some nebulous evil, locked in a prison of shadow forever because the others hadn't made it there to help her. His son back home, waiting in vain for his parents to return. And then he saw three bleached white skeletons half-buried by the sands of some post-apocalyptic wasteland game, one little, one big, and one medium-sized and clad in pitted armor half-rusted away...

His wife wasn't just being hard-hearted. She had a point. But...

He couldn't just do _nothing._

The pie split into even halves in his hands, and he handed one of them to the elf. "There you go. I'm sorry I can't do more."

It was already half-gone before he turned away, and he knew it hadn't been nearly enough.

* * *

The path wound through farms and glades, climbing gradually, until they reached the low cliffs which marked the edge of Neophyte's Glen and entered the mountain pass. Steep walls of stone rose up on either side.

Calhoun was the only one who noticed the elf was following them. She was even perceptive enough to see the dark smear of filling on the girl's face, which definitely didn't belong to a _peach_ pie, but she didn't say anything. Felix was going to be Felix, and leaving a situation without doing something to fix it just wasn't in his nature. It was part of why she loved him, after all.

She was ready for the bandit chief, but she wasn't expecting the chasm. None of them were. Ralph almost blundered into it while gazing up at the unusual (for him) blue of the skybox, and she had to grab his weapons belt and haul him back before he went right over the edge.

"Wow. Thanks. That would have been... bad." Ralph peered over the jagged rim of the precipice at the jagged spears of rock looming up out of the mist far, far below. It was enough to make him miss his nice soft mud puddle.

Calhoun jerked a thumb at the weathered twin posts driven into the ground at the cliff's edge. "I think there's supposed to be a bridge here."

"I think you're right. I can see planks down there. Well... they used to be planks, I think. More like a whole lot of splinters, now."

"Halt!" boomed a voice. An armored soldier emerged from a nearby guard hut built into the stone walls. "Stay back! Danger! The bridge is out!"

Ralph frowned. "No kidding, buddy. Thanks for the timely warning."

"Until it's rebuilt, all traffic to Birchgrove must return to its point of origin!" the soldier barked. "And don't even think of trying to go through that cave. It's filled with bloodthirsty bandits! You'd be robbed and left for dead before you got ten feet! Best just to go back the way you came. _Anything_ is better than risking the cave."

"Okay, okay, we won't go in the cave," Ralph said with a shrug.

"Wh-" the soldier gurgled, taken aback. "You idiot, of _course_ you're supposed to go in the cave! Why else would I have brought it up? There's no other way to Birchgrove, I assure you."

"What about when the bridge is rebuilt?"

"It _never_ gets rebuilt! Not from this side, anyway. You have to beat the bandit chief first, and then you can cross back and forth all day if you please. But if you want to wait around for it on _this_ side, you'd better be ready for a long, long, long-"

Felix began tapping the golden hammer on the end of his staff against one of the bridge posts. On the first tap, the post straightened. On the second tap, the shattered boards and rotted ropes rose from the chasm. On the third, they clumped together in a rough semblance of the original bridge. And on the final tap, they knotted together into a sturdy wooden crossing that looked brand new. It even smelled a little bit like sawdust.

"Buh," said the guard.

"Looks like we're off to Birchgrove, then," Felix said cheerfully.

"Hey! Hold on, now, that's sequence breaking, you can't do that!" the guard shouted. "You get back here and go through that bandit cave right now!"

Felix didn't look back until he heard a high-pitched shriek from behind him. He turned to see the elf girl peering out from behind a boulder, a look of delight and astonishment illuminating her face. "The bridge!" she squealed. "You fixed the bridge!"

She wheeled and took off down the path. He could hear her voice cutting through the sharp mountain air.

"Hey, everybody! Guess what? _Guess what? We can leave now!_"

As the first rumbles and squeaks of surprise came from the dwarves and gnomelings living nearest the mountains, Felix felt a broad grin spreading across his face.

Who _says_ you can't help everybody?


	11. Vampire Elves Vs Buttered Popcorn

Scourgica Slayhaven had gained her 40th level back when that was a real accomplishment. She'd delved beneath the earth and dove into the Sea of Spiders to retrieve the Nightwhisper Helm. She'd slain the Gorilla King in the Treetop Coliseum and wrested the Nightwhisper Breastplate from his four hairy fists. She'd won the Pie-Eating Contest of Fire Mountain, gulping down twenty-eight Hot Magma Turnovers and being awarded the Nightwhisper Pauldrons. She'd even forked over two thousand gold pieces for the Nightwhisper Boots.

In fact, she'd had the entire Nightwhisper set. It was immortalized in a high-resolution screenshot she kept above her mantle. There they were, three bold adventurers standing astride the rapidly warming corpse of the Five-Headed Ice Troll of Soulmelt Glacier. On the left, the dwarf, Angus McBeardo, hammer at the ready, golden hair flowing from his chin and gleaming in the morning sun. On the right, Blackleaf the dryad, birchbark skin carved with softly glowing runes, her mossy staff held high.

And in between them was Scourgica Slayhaven, vampire elf barbarian, resplendent in her armor of black chitin. Skin like polished bone. Hair the color of a raven's wing. A sword as big as she was, held aloft in one shining gauntlet, dripping with blue glimmers of ice troll blood. She had been the envy of all who looked upon her complete endgame-ready armor set and carefully chosen battle feats.

Then things... changed. Angus' player got really into some new space game and never signed on anymore. Blackleaf's player's mom made her cancel her subscription because her grades were bad. Scourgica kept going, for a while, but she could feel that her player was getting bored. After almost two weeks of puttering around her mansion, she got the news. Melissa's subscription had expired. And that was that.

She still hung around the taverns sometimes, but it wasn't the same. Expansions came out. The level cap was raised. Nightwhisper wasn't that good an armor set anymore. She started feeling a little pathetic, and stopped going.

Now she mostly just stayed home and watched the daytime RP soaps and the mini-games. It wasn't a bad life. When your account was canceled, you got to put all kinds of anachronistic things into your house; that's how she got her TV and her mini-fridge and her Snax Wizard Dee-Luxx Popcorn Conjurer. Active PCs had to miss out on all that stuff.

"I have something to tell you," wailed the fragile-looking elf on the TV screen, her eyes brimming with tears. "I've been hiding... these!"

She shucked off her robe, revealing a huge pair of silver wings.

"Oh, my love, but they are beautiful!" said the reedy, penciled-mustached elf man. "And I cannot stay mad at _you_. Not at someone who is both my fiancee and..._my mother!_"

He tore off his own shirt, revealing wings of his own. "No!" gasped the elf woman, fluttering around the room in dismay. "I _can't _be your mother. Because you're actually my _father!_"

_This is getting really good_, Scourgica thought, stuffing a handful of buttered popcorn in her mouth.

The doorbell buzzed.

Scourgica almost jumped out of her seat. Who would be visiting _her?_ Could it be Blackleaf, arriving (she glanced at the clock) three hours and forty minutes early for their weekly checkers game?

"'sat you, Leaf?" she called.

"No," said a man's voice.

Great, she was going to have to get up, now. _Why_ hadn't she pretended not to be home? She hoisted herself out of her lounger and brushed popcorn fragments off of her middle.

She peeked through the keyhole. Three people were standing on her doorstep. Well, perfect. She knew what _this_ was.

"Hello. I'm very happy with my current save slot," she hissed, opening the door a crack, "and I'm not at all concerned with whether I'll get a New Game Plus, so you can take your tracts and your pamphlets and stick 'em-"

"Are you Scourgica Slayhaven?" the little bearded gnomeling asked. "The famous a-adventurer?"

Scourgica blinked her glittering red eyes. "I, uh...buh?"

"Because we could really use your knowledge and, and your skills, too, if you're amenable, Ms. Slayhaven."

"Ah... hold on a sec."

Scourgica slammed the door and leaned against it, mind whirling. Someone actually wanted her expertise? Why? She was only Level 40, after all. People were hitting 100 nowadays.

_Plus I'm not exactly in top condition_, she thought ruefully, looking down at herself. All the buttered popcorn had seen to _that_. She still had her Nightwhisper set in the closet, but it would have taken an industrial-strength shrinking spell to get her back into it. And whoever was outside probably wouldn't be impressed by her ratty undershirt and threadbare sweatpants.

She pulled on her burgundy robe, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

"Who seeks the Bane of Dreadfire Gulch?" she said archly. "The Wrath of the Grizzlewood? The Hacker of the Hundred Harpies?"

"Uh, well, if those are you, then we do, lady," the big rogue said, presenting a gigantic hand. "Ralph, the, uh, Scourge of Niceland, at your service. Didn't know you were a villain too. I like the red eyes; real classic look there."

"An-antihero," Scourgica said, "actually." She wrapped her pale fingers around one of Ralph's and shook gently.

"Hey, best of both worlds," Ralph said with a grin. "Good without being all _good_ about it. I like it."

"Well, thank you," Scourgica said, smiling back. "...Ralph."

"All right, all right," Calhoun said, "we're not here for you to make goo-goo fingers at the locals. This is a rescue mission. Remember?"

"Why can't we do both?" Ralph asked. Calhoun ignored him and stepped forward.

"Ma'am, we need to find out way to a console. Melissa's console, to be specific."

"M-my player?" Scourgica blinked. "But her account's inactive. I haven't seen her in forever!"

"Well, she's still around, and right now her game system is entertaining a little uninvited guest. We need to retrieve our friend Vanellope before-"

"Wait, that _princess?_" Scourgica's brow furrowed. "I never really got out to any of the other games, but from what I heard, she's kind of a horror show. Brr. Makes me glad the portal is bricked up now."

"The portal?"

"Over there." Scourgica stepped out onto the cobblestones of Windharrow's player housing district and pointed to the end of the street, where a small hedgerow didn't do much to disguise the blank expanse of grey brick.

Felix hopped over and ran a hand over the rough surface. "This is fairly recent work. Maybe four or five months ago."

"That's right!" Scourgica said, surprised. "Your friend has a good eye, Ralph. What schools of magic did you say he studied?"

"Uh, I guess you'd say... architecture."

"It's solid brick," Felix said, "two layers, but there's a door underneath."

Calhoun raised an eyebrow. "Nice work. You know, honey, you could teach our ship sensors a thing or two." She bent down and kissed him on the top of the head.

Felix blushed. "Aw, I just know construction, that's all."

"If the door is still there, it means _Empire of Questing_ is still installed on the target console. The account's just been deactivated. If we can get through the brick-"

"That's where I come in," Ralph said, lumbering forward. "Just two layers, huh? No problem."

He wound up and smashed his fist into the wall like a meteor, pulverizing the bricks. Grey dust and fragments of rock and dried cement fell away from his fingers as he withdrew then, and what was left of the outer wall collapsed in great shattered slabs.

"One wall, _wrecked_," Ralph said cheerfully, waving away the choking dust. "Now, I-"

His face fell as the dust cleared. The door beneath the brick was entirely unharmed. What's more, it looked pretty much unharmable. Several tons of black metal, double-chained and reinforced with multiple bolts.

Calhoun eyed the door. "That looks a little permanent to me."

"They don't want people playing for free," Scourgica explained.

"There's no such thing as a permanent door," Ralph growled. "Not while I'm around!"

He raised his fists, first one, then the other, hammering away at the metal monster, sending deafening clangs echoing down the streets of Windharrow and cracking the city wall in crazy patterns. The door itself remained unscathed.

Ralph pounded away, harder and harder, until the metal glowed a dull red from the heat and the friction of his blows. But still the door was unmoved. After several minutes of sustained pounding, he stopped, arms aching, knuckles raw, and leaned against the crumbling city wall.

"That... is one tough... door."

Scourgica took his hand in hers and patted it. "You nearly brought down the city down around us to save your friend."

He looked stricken. "Oh, uh, I'm sorry, it's just-"

"Don't apologize. I just meant-you're kind of an anti-hero too. You know that?" She sighed. "But nobody can break through one of those doors. They resist any attack you make. It would take hundreds of attacks at once to overwhelm that. You'd need an army!"

Ralph smiled. "Is that all?"

He pointed down the street. Scourgica followed his finger. Her jaw dropped.

"Are-are those-?"

"They followed us here. Used to be even more; these are just the one who stayed with us."

"But...but how many...?"

"I dunno, probably about a hundred."

"Between five and six thousand," Calhoun corrected. "Mostly level 1s, though."

It was still an impressive sight, seeing all those low-level gnomelings and elves and dryads and dwarves marching side-by-side through the streets of the capitol. A few had armor, some were in their underwear, but most of them were in furs and simple peasant clothes. Most of them were armed only with heavy sticks that they'd picked up on the way, and they were gawking at the buildings like yokels.

But there were just so _many_ of them...

"I guess they just didn't have anywhere else to go," Felix said. "We could sure use their help, though. 'Scuse me, fellas? And, er, fellerettes?"

The horde of level 1s stopped and looked at him.

"Er...I don't suppose you'd mind helping us get this open?"

A gleeful roar went up from the crowd, and they rushed forward to pound on the wall of metal with everything they had. Ralph hoisted Scourgica out of the way just in time.

"Guess you're popular everywhere," he told Felix. "These guys look up to you as much as the Nicelanders do."

A particularly burly dwarf let loose a spittle-spraying scream, hefted a park bench over his head, and flung it at the door, where it smashed into a splinters and wrought-iron chunks.

"They grow 'em a little feistier here than in Niceland, thought," Ralph observed cheerfully.

"J-jiminy jaminy. I'm gonna have to watch what I say."

As they watched the door slowly warp and buckle over the ceaseless onslaught, Ralph turned to Scourgica. "So, uh, listen. You want to come with us?"

"What?"

"You know, in case we need backup. Not that we're not tough, between ourselves, but... well, I'm never ever actually been on a home system before. I don't know what to expect."

"I...I don't know," Scourgica stammered. "I'm only level 40."

"People don't usually play _my _game past level 5," Ralph said with a shrug.

"I'd miss my RPs," she pointed out. "Galahadrine is supposed to come out of her coma any day now."

"Aw, come on! There's more to life that sitting around watching TV, you know! There's going out and playing_ video games!_"

Scourgica watched as the last of the wall tore away from its retaining bolts and a great cheer went up from the crowd.

"Well... what the hell," she said, displaying her fangs in a smile that sparkled not a bit less for all the artificial butter flavoring coating it. "Just let me get my sword!"

* * *

Some time later, a dryad turned the corner, box tucked neatly under one arm. She dropped it when she saw the devastation at the end of the street. Checkers spilled out, rolling across the flagstones.

"Oh my g-goodness!" she squeaked. "Scourgica! _Scourgica! _ Are you all right?"

"She's gone," said the small figure in the street. "They're all gone. But I'm on their trail."

He held up one arm, and she could see that it wasn't a real arm at all, but a complicated dish device that looked like on of the things the gnomelings used to track people.

"Who... who are you?"

He turned. _Why, he's just a baby_, she thought, but the fierce look on his face couldn't have been more unsettling if it had come from a six-hundred-pound short-tempered ogre who'd just gotten a parking ticket.

"Fix-It Felix the 3rd. I came from hell, and I'm here to raise it."

"I'm Blackleaf. I came to play checkers." The dryad gulped, and put on her sweetest voice, which emerges as a bit of a scared croak. "W-would you like to play while we wait for your mommy or... Satan, or whoever?"

"Checkers?" Third spat. "I'm from the Space Marines. We eat fire and make earthquakes in our diapers. We don't play _checkers._"

"Wh-what about peekaboo?"

"If you're making fun of a Marine, woman-"

Blackleaf covered her face with her hands.

"Dammit!" Third swore. "So it's a cloaking device, is it? Well, I don't have time for your little games!"

Cursing, firing wildly into the street, and frantically checking his radar, the baby retreated through the doorway. In moments the street was empty, save for a few drifts of smoke, a handful of unexploded plasma charges, and a crouching dryad who had just decided she would _never_ have kids.


	12. The March on the Menu Channel

The sealed double doors to _Empire of Questing _exploded outward in an avalanche of twisted iron and crumbling masonry.

A murmur went through the Menu Channel pedestrians as heads turned towards the destruction. Eyes strained against the dim light as four figures strode from the gaping doorway. A woman in gleaming armor, her walk the confident stride of a leader. A man in robes, tugging at his beard and tapping a golden-tipped staff on the tiles as he went. A titan of a man, fists like living anvils of bone and muscle, loping along purposefully. And a pale-skinned, raven-haired woman drowning in voluminous black robes that swirled around her like living fingers of shadow.

The murmurs only intensified at what came next. Hundreds upon hundreds of creatures began to pour from the hole, a wave of pink and brown, pale and tan, purple skin and green, all dressed in cheap-looking clothing and most armed with sticks and spears.

"Wh-what's going on?" asked a frightened mushroom retainer, clutching the trunk of a nearby Elcor.

"Facade of cheerful optimism failing to conceal own mounting unease: I'm sure it's nothing to worry about," the elephantine alien droned.

The crowd fell away to let the army of low-level characters through. Felix felt sweat beading his brow. The whole situation was uncomfortable. He was used to attention, but not _this_ kind of attention. Not having people be _afraid_ of him.

Then again, it might have been the beard. That was pretty uncomfortable too. And _scratchy_.

Suddenly, a voice called from the crowd. "Fizwit! Fizwit, it's me!" A muscular elven man rushed towards the newcomers, his arms flung wide and his plate-mail clanking like mad. He picked up a low-level gnomeling woman and spun her around.

"Oh, CaptAwesomeguy11!" the gnomeling said, rubbing her bulbous nose against his bronzed cheek. "I never thought... I would ever see you again...!"

The tension was broken as more shouts of recognition and happy reunions went up. Even the majority of exiled _Empire of Questing_ characters who didn't know one of the newcomers were just happy to catch up on what's been happening in their world.

"You mean they finally added quests to that old zone?"

"No! Orite is going for _how _many gold? Oh, if only I'd stockpiled!"

"Ever since they added mermaids as a player race they're all over everywhere...not that I'm legs-ist or anything..."

The menu channel was rapidly turning into an impromptu block party, and the other game characters were starting to be drawn in. Only Ralph's group stood apart. The big man scanned the crowd, brow furrowing.

He should have known it wasn't going to be that easy, but he'd almost thought for a moment that he might hear a familiar chirpy voice and see an untipy mop of black hair sprinkled with candy bobbing towards him through the crowds.

_But she_ is _here somewhere_, he told himself. _She's gotta be._

"Vanellope!" he called, trying to pick her out of the massive, rowdy crowd of angry birds and Servbots and pikmin and killer turtles. Some of the level 1 dwarves had started an impromptu drinking contest. He wasn't even sure if anyone could hear him over the din.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed. "_Vanellopeeeeee!_"

"Stop all that shouting!" reprimanded a man in the uniform of a city guard. "You're making people nervous!"

"Look, pal, I _happen_ to be looking for a friend of mine."

"I think you've got enough friends here already," said Sonic, prying a few gnomelings loose from his spines. "They're out of control, and that's _no good_."

"Oh, I know you, uh, the guy from the safety ads. You're Eggman's good guy, right? I know these guys are a little feisty, but-"

"_Too _feisty," Calhoun said, separating a couple of drunken dwarves who'd gotten into a fistfight. She held them up by their collars; both were still flailing wildly at the air. "Utterly undisciplined."

Scourgica sighed. "We call it 'tutorial recklessness'."

"What?"

"You can't die in the tutorial; if you take enough damage you heal up automatically. Even the bandit you have to fight to get out of it doesn't really kill you, just takes most of your life and sort of...kicks you back. None of these people have ever been in a _real_ fight. They've never developed a true sense of danger."

"Well, they're out of their game now," Calhoun observed. "That sort of behavior is a one-way ticket to Permadeath Station."

"We'd better round them up before something happens," Felix observed.

"Agreed," Calhoun nodded. "We brought them here. This is our poo poo popsicle, and we're the ones who have to lick it."

"We need to find Vanellope," Ralph reminded them. "She's here somewhere."

"Yes, but-"

"Let me know if you see anything," Ralph said, pushing his way through the crowd. "Vanellope! _Vanellope!_"

He asked everyone he saw who wasn't a celebrating Level 1.

"Excuse me, I'm looking for a Vanellope von Schweetz... she's about this tall... dressed in a green hoodie... Have you seen her? Candy in her hair... hey you, I'm looking for someone-"

He finally hit pay dirt when he found a lanky, mustached man in a green T-shirt who claimed he knew her.

"Well, sure, I've heard of Princess Vanellope," the man, who'd introduced himself as Kenny, said. He took off his trucker cap for a moment to scratch his head. "Everyone does. Folks just don't like to talk about her much."

"Wh-what does that mean?" Ralph said, voice quavering.

"It means she's a control freak and everyone knows it!" the man snapped. "She's dangerous! But nobody around here wants to step up and make the hard decisions about what to do about it!"

"Are we talking about the same person?" Ralph asked. "Vanellope can be bratty, sure, but she's not a bad kid."

"Then we ain't talkin' about the same person at all," Kenny said bluntly. "_Our_ Vanellope is just plain rotten to the core. They say she invites racers into that game of hers and... well, I don't know what she does, but it's a matter of plain record that they don't come back."

"And her definition of a racer is pretty loose," he added. "She even stole my RV!"

"So... your Vanellope, she's the president of her own version of _Sugar Rush Speedway?_"

"She _calls_ herself a princess. More like a dictator, you ask me."

"Then that's-that's it!" Ralph said. "That's where she must have gone! She was stuck in a strange place; she would have tried to go _home! _To _Sugar Rush!_"

He eyed the distant game screens hanging above them. There it was, glittering flakes of sugar crystal snow dusted over soft pastry mountains.

"She a racer?"

"She was the best," Ralph said with a grin.

"Better forget about her, then, if Princess Vanellope's got her hands on her."

Ralph's grin faded. "You don't think she'd really..."

"She could do anything," Kenny said darkly.

"Then I have to get in there before she does."

"You're talkin' about a suicide mission. She's got a whole candy _army_ in there."

"We've got an army of our own..." Ralph glanced back at the throngs of level 1s. The drunken dwarf brigade was crowd-surfing across a pile of gnomelings who were struggling to hold them up. "...uh, sort of. I guess we could use some help."

"Sorry," Kenny said. "I feel for that girl. I do. But I got my own family to take care of."

"Then we'll have to make do with what we have," Ralph shrugged, and stomped off to find the others.

* * *

"I never expected to run into _you_ out here," Scourgica laughed, patting her erstwhile dwarven partner on the shoulder. "I thought you just retired to another part of the empire! Whatever were you doing on my player's console?"

Angus McBeardo blushed. "Ye know tha' girl yeh used ta send yer valuables to?"

"AuctionAlt88? She was a sweetie."

"Well, we were out here havin' a bit of a date when the whole business went sideways." His face deepened from pink to red. "Couldn't get back in. Lucky I was retired, didn't have ta worry about my player wonderin' where I got to."

"You and Auctiony?" Scourgica gasped. "I never would have guessed that. Congratulations!"

"Well, now, was just a wee date, nothin' permanent. Matter of fact, she's off with that hedgehog of hers now. Word is he's plannin' on givin' her an engagement ring the next time he takes damage." He smiled wryly. "But don't feel bad fer me, _I'm_ datin' Catwoman."

"Catwoman?"

"Yeah. Lego Catwoman, but still Catwoman."

"You haven't changed, Angus," Scourgica said with a smile.

"Nor you, lass," the dwarf laughed. "Been enjoyin' your retirement?"

"A little too much, maybe," Scourgica said, patting her stomach. "I'm afraid I've gotten a little soft."

"Ah, well, happens t' the best of us," Angus said. "A little adventurin' will soon have yeh whipped into back into fightin' shape."

"Scourgica?" It was Ralph's voice. Scourgica straightened up her back at once and hastily sucked in her stomach before turning around.

"Yes?"

"I know where she is," the massive man said. "But she might be in trouble. We're got a ways to go and we need to get there quick, so we're heading out right away."

"Sounds like there's some adventurin' on the menu right now," Angus said, nudging the elf. "Go to it, lass."

Scourgica nodded. _ This is just what I need_, she told herself. _A good, long, strenuous hike. These buttered popcorn pounds will melt off in no time_.

"Where are we headed?" she asked. "A steamy jungle? An endless desert?"

"Nah," Ralph said. "_Sugar Rush Speedway_. It's a whole world made out of cake and candy."

Scourgica exhaled, and her shoulders slumped. _Peachy._

* * *

Vanellope's eyelids fluttered. "Ugh...wh're 'm I?"

She could feel something flat and hard under her. Yawning, she raised herself to a sitting position and managed to pry her heavy eyelids open far enough to take in her surroundings.

They came in snatches as her consciousness fuzzed in and out. Bright lights glaring down from above her, filling the room. Walls of sterile, medical-looking white chocolate. The waxy Pop Tart she was sitting on. Professor Beechwood, setting gleaming instruments out onto the table.

"What... what are you doing?" she asked. Then she remembered. "Hey! You're gonna-"

He looked up. His hair was a frazzled bird's nest, and he had a black eye. Someone had roughed him up.

"I _had_ hoped the sedative wouldn't wear off," he sighed, picking up something long and wicked-looking. "This isn't going to be fun, no, not fun at all..."


	13. On the Operating Pastry

Congrats to Wreck-It Ralph for winning the Annie for Best Animated Feature! And now back to the gruesome experimental vivisection!

* * *

Professor Beechwood approached the Pop-Tart operating table, pulling on a surgical mask with one hand and, in the other, wielding a sharp metal instrument that looked like a cross between an eggbeater and a harpoon.

"H-hey, so, uh, what exactly does that thing do, anyway?" Vanellope asked nervously.

"It's a code extractor," Beechwood explained, his reedy voice muffled by the mask. "It's honestly not as bad as it looks."

"Really?" Vanellope said, cocking her head. "'Cause I gotta tell ya, it looks pretty darn bad."

"Well, er, it's certainly going to be no picnic. I've been, ahh, brushing up, and I believe I can isolate the sequence that causes your glitch and excise it without damaging the surrounding code."

"But I_ like_ my glitch," Vanellope sighed. "We don't really need to do this now, do we? I mean, there's gotta be another way!"

"Must I remind you of what your counterpart will do to me...us..._everybody_ if we don't go through with the operation?" Beechwood hissed. "Do you think I'm happy with this turn of events? It would take months to make a proper map of Arcadian code! Years! As it is, I'll be able to examine you for hours at best."

"Minutes," sang a syrupy-sweet voice from above them. Vanellope and Beechwood looked up. Vanille 2k was leaning over the candy-cane railing which separated the observation area from the operating theater.

"Whaa?" Beechwood asked.

"I'll give you, let's see... five minutes," Vanille 2k said. "That should be _more_ than enough time."

"B-but that's...that's preposterous!" the professor stammered. "Five minutes isn't even enough time to do a... a preliminary survey of her electrophysiology!"

"Then don't do that."

"But it's essential!"

Vanille 2k shrugged. "Don't care. You _know_ what I want, Professor. Your job is to take it out of her and install it in me. It shouldn't be complicated. She's _practically_ my twin. My shorter, uglier twin."

"But-the danger!"

"If you're half as smart as you claim to be, she'll live. Probably."

"The danger _to you_," Beechwood clarified, removing his mask and using it to mop his forehead before replacing it. "Oh dear, I can't just pull out code and slap it in someone else willy-nilly, I, I..."

Vanille 2k frowned. "Now, you wouldn't be trying to stall for time, would you, Professor?"

"No!" Beechwood yelped. "I swear! B-but this is all _experimental_, I tell you! I don't know what I'm doing! I don't even know if this will _work_. I'm no surgeon! And I've certainly never tried anything like _this_ before."

A table of medical equipment and beakers exploded in a shower of glass and metal, making both Vanellope and Beechwood jump.

"I have," Vanille 2k said calmly.

She hopped lightly down from the railing and strode forward through the slag, her shoes crunching on the powdered glass. Where her right forearm had been was a round blue tube, its muzzle still steaming from the heat of the shot.

"You..." Beechwood stammered, "you...you've done this already. Taken other things."

Vanille 2k blew a wisp of steam away from the arm cannon. "This used to belong to Mega Man, you know. But it's mine now. Rather ironic when you think about it, isn't it?"

"It's rather stupid if ya ask me," Vanellope said, crossing her arms. "This is a racin' game, not a shoot 'em up! Whaddya need something like that for?"

Vanille 2k put her foot up on the operating table and pushed down, the muscles in her calf bulging in a distinctly un-skinny-little-girlish way. The other end of the Pop-Tart lifted into the air, and Vanellope slid helplessly down into her evil counterpart's iron grip. With a mixture of horror and disgust, she watched a fissure of blue-green scar tissue blossom across Vanille 2k's face as she pulled Vanellope closer.

"Some of us would rather not stagnate. Some of us want to reach our full potential. Be the very best that we can be. And that takes firepower. Not to mention muscles, courtesy of our friend Zangief." She smirked, the deep scar splitting her lip gruesomely. "The second-player one with the alternate color scheme, to be specific. I don't expect Ol' Turquoise Scabs to be missed anytime soon."

"So where'd you steal that stanky breath?" Vanellope asked. "D'ja catch Wario after a week-long garlic and sardine binge?"

Vanille 2k frowned, let the table drop, and tossed Vanellope back onto it. The add-ons receded, and once again she looked like any other moderately psychotic candy princess.

"The point is," she snarled, "that I did the _others_ on my _own_, so I don't see how _this_ shouldn't be _easy_ for a doctor."

"I'm n-not that kind of doctor!" Beechwood protested.

"Then _learn fast!_" Vanille 2k snapped. "I want that glitch."

"Lady, you're _already _a ball of glitches, and most of 'em are in your head." Vanellope said.

Vanille's eyes flashed. "How _dare_ you talk to a princess this way?"

"You may be able to dismember me, but you can't make me be polite about it!" Vanellope shot back. "And just between you, me, and everybody who's ever met you, Tootsie Pop, you're nuttier than a jar of cashew butter!"

"I am _royalty!_ And royalty is meant to rule. Royalty is meant to be _obeyed!_"

"Pfft, uh-huh. I tell ya, I dunno what it is about this place that drives the crowned heads bonkers, but I'm glad _I'm_ a President."

"ENOUGH!" Vanille 2k roared. "I'm tired of your foul little tongue! Carve her up, old man. Now!"

"I-I-" Beechwood stammered, stepping back.

"Or I start carving _you!_" the princess warned. She raised a hand threateningly. _Wonder if she's got a sword stored away somewhere in that mess of code?_, Vanellope thought.

Beechwood raised the extractor. "Your highness, I-"

"Do it!"

The professor stepped towards the table, steps leaden. He twisted the handle of the extractor. Motors whined and coughed, and the blades began whirling in a complex ballet of stainless steel. The heavy needles whirred in and out of their shafts like the stingers of some huge mechanical bee.

Vanellope wanted desperately to glitch away. Only the thought of how many people and creatures this twisted monarch was holding hostage kept her glued to the table. And yet still, as the machine hovered closer, her mind kept telling her to run. She wanted to glitch through the wall and keep glitching until she was ought of Sugar Rush Speedway 2000 forever. Anything would be better than being here, looking at this grotesque, cackling caricature of her herself.

_Well_, she thought, closing her eyes against the slick, shimmering razors, _ if this goes really bad, I won't have to look at her anymore. That's a plus, right?_

Beechwood brought the extractor down, the armory of attachments whining as they cut through the air, then snarling like a hungry animal as they made contact. A crimson geyser erupted, splattering the operating theater with thick strands of sugary red goop.

"EEEEEEEEYAAARGH!" Vanellope screamed. "STOP STOP STOP STOP-"

Her scream began to peter out as she noticed a distinct lack of machinery impaling her. "-stop... stop?"

She opened her eyes. The extractor was lodged firmly in the Pop-Tart, still sputtering away, excavating the strawberry filling and spewing it messily from its output hose.

"I won't do it!" Professor Beechwood said, letting go of the machine. "It would be unethical and wrong and I-I just won't, do you hear me?"

Vanellope smiled. "Professor, you-"

"This young lady is an incalculably valuable scientific specimen!"

"-well, better than nothin', I guess." Vanellope shrugged.

Vanille 2k's eyes narrowed. "Well. Fine. I hope you're _happy_, forcing me to get my hands dirty like this. This isn't going to be fun. For_ either_ of you."

She pulled a pair of objects from the front pocket of her dress. They looked like small, colorful tubes decorated with rainbow stripes. Vanellope was sure she'd seen something like them somewhere in her kingdom, but she couldn't quite remember-

"Your Majesty!"

Vanille 2k whirled to face the new voice, stuffing the tubes back into her pocket. "What is it, Tom? This had better be earth-shattering news."

"Yessss," the general gasped. He was ought of breath and sweating so hard that he was half melted. "It is! The mountain... the mountain with the gate to the Menu Channel..."

"What about it? Spit it out!"

"Total collapse, your majesty! Utterly destroyed!" He gritted his teeth and choked out the rest of his message. "And _an army _is marching out of the crumbs!"

"So this is it," Vanille 2k snarled. "The showdown. Good! I'll crush them all at once."

"Your majesty?"

"I never thought the other games would have the bits for this. _I_ expected to be doing the invading. Squeezing them off the system one by one." Vanille 2k's face was lit with a savage joy. "I'd say this sort of bravery deserves a reward. Let's give them a real show."

"I've already send word to the Project P team. It'll be operational by the time you reach the hangar."

"Your foresight is appreciated, Tom. And _do_ field the armies as soon as you can, would you? I prefer my victories overwhelming."

She shot one last look over her shoulder. "I'll deal with _you two_ later."

And, with awakening mutant code already writhing beneath her skin, the Princess strode off to war.


	14. The Loading Screen Before the Storm

_ And so once again I find myself doing battle with the oxymoron which is the Flavored Plain. Ten square miles of undetailed background at the rear end of Nowhere. It's the pink frosting that's the worst. It gets in everything. Even the seals on my boots, which are supposed to be certified against hard vacuum and temperatures up to 40,000 degrees-_

Calhoun stopped and looked down at her metal greaves. For a moment, she'd forgotten that she was no longer in her old armor. She wriggled her toes uncomfortably in the squishy frosting. Blecch.

"Now, now you be careful," she heard Felix saying behind her. "You're not in your game anymore, fellas... Fellas? Oh, butterscotch and biscuits!"

A ball of pink frosting splattered against the back of Calhoun's head. She turned to see her husband ducking and dodging away from more of the sugary missiles as a frostingball fight erupted between some of the level 1s.

"LOOK!" yelled a particularly loud dwarf. "I'M MAKIN' A FROSTING ANGEL!"

"I'M GONNA EAT THE WHOLE GROUND! NYAM NYAM NYAM!" screeched a gnomeling.

"It is just me, or are they getting worse?" Calhoun asked.

Felix sighed. "Ohhh, dear. I think it's all the candy. They're on a... a..."

"A sugar rush?"

"That would be the word for it."

Ahead of them, Ralph loped along the ground like a gorilla, propelling himself through the sludge with his massive fists. He kept his eyes on the end of the plain, where low donuts foothills led into the mountains of the interior.

_She'll be at the castle for sure_, he told himself. _She's gotta be_.

He squinted at the dark, distant peaks, trying to catch a glimpse of the gleaming edifice at the center of Sugar Rush. He paused. He couldn't see the castle-but there was something else there, something dark, spreading slowly across the crags like molasses.

He heard Scourgica coming up from behind, her boots making sclorping sounds as she struggled through the frosting. "Hold...hold on...a minute," she gasped. "Just...gotta catch... my..."

"What is that?" Ralph asked, pointing. "Can you tell what it is?"

The vampire barbarian narrowed her eyes. "It's... it looks like people. I think. Or creatures., maybe. I'm not sure."

"People?" Ralph breathed. Even in Game Central Station, he'd never seen so many rendered at once before. "What would a whole crowd of people be doing out here?"

"They're not just a crowd," Scourgica said, frowning. "They're an army."

* * *

"Come on!"

"Oh dear, oh dear," Professor Beechwood fretted. "If we get caught, we'll..."

"We're not gonna get caught," Vanellope said, exasperated. "What're we supposed to do, stay back there until she comes back? You oughtta be glad I even let you come along after-YIKES!"

Beechwood pulled her back into the alcove just in time as a phalanx of heavily-armed Oreos thundered down the hall.

"C'mon, let's follow them!" Vanellope said, hopping out as soon as they were past.

"_Follow them?!_ Why?"

"Because," the girl explained patiently, "wherever they're going has gotta be where the exit is, right?"

They continued down the hall until they reached an open area. For a moment, Vanellope thought they were outside; then, she realized that they were actually in an immense hangar. Gingerbread soldiers, candy cane commandos, and all manner of assorted tough cookies were loading barrels of non-sentient candy onto something so huge it filled the entire outer wall.

"Whoa! What is that?"

"It's probably that Project P thing she was talking about-oh, look, let's just go!" Beechwood said. "This obviously isn't the way out of here."

"I'm gonna check it out anyway. Hey, if you don't wanna come, feel free to take your chances goin' through the castle on your own."

"Oh dear, oh dear..."

Scuttling from pallet to pallet, keeping the stacks of barrels between them and the cohorts of candy soldiers, they made their way to the edge. Vanellope turned her head left and right, trying to get a sense of the thing docked at the hangar, but it curved out of sight in all directions. It was striped in red and yellow and bright parakeet green, and she figured it might be a giant jawbreaker, but when she stretched a hand out over the gap to touch the side, she felt...

"Tissue paper?"

She tapped experimentally on the hull. There was a hollow thunk.

"Huh, what's this thing supposed to be, anyway?"

"Look out!" Beechwood hissed. "There are more coming up behind!"

"Oh, son of a s'more!" Vanellope cursed. "Hide!"

There was really only one place _to_ hide. They scurried up the nearest ramp and into the dark interior of Project P.

* * *

"And I was down there so long that time lost all meaning, hoo hoo! Just me and my rats. I miss my rats." Turbo sighed. "I'd still be down there if Vanellope hadn't come along and broken me out!"

"I thought you said Vanellope put you _in_ there," objected a Shyguy.

"No, no, that was the other Vanellope, the old Vanellope, this is a new Vanellope, who's older. It's all very simple."

"He's right!" screeched Toad, still scraping loose frosting from under his cap. "She had all us racers locked up! And she's got a lot more jail cells down there. Well, she did until Wario farted on 'em, anyway."

"Didn't I tell y'all she was up to no good in there?" Kenny complained. "How many times do we haveta go over this? We gotta deal with this situation before it gets worse!"

The assembled video game characters muttered and shuffled their feet, paws, tripods, and other assorted appendages. "Well, I don't like to cause a fuss," a xenomorph said shyly.

Suddenly, a barking cry echoed across the Menu Channel. "I've never seen such a sorry bunch of namby-pamby, thumb-sucking diaper-fillers in my life!"

The crowed parted as a baby marched to the front, drumming his fingers on his golden plasma rifle arm. "What are you bunch of wimps waiting for? You all just gonna stand around until your timers run out?"

He hopped up on a Thwomp. "I heard it all, see? I heard what's goin' on, and I heard what you all said back, and I just about blew my Gerber! You think you're safe here, hiding in your precious menu channel? Think again! Oh, sure, this two-bit tin-pot sugar cube might only be going after racers now! But what about tomorrow? What happens if she decides she's going after fighting games next? Or puzzles? Or RPGSs? Are you all gonna hide under the bed and wait for her to go away?"

"Uh..." a goblin piped up. "Uh, no?"

"You're brick-breakin' right, no!" Third hopped up and down. "You're an army! You! You can breathe fire! _You_ can run faster than the speed of sound! _You_ can..you can eat fruit! If we combine our abilities, there's nothing this team couldn't accomplish! Are you with me?"

"Hell, yeah, I'm with you!" Kenny said enthusiastically. "Just let me run home and get my salt lick and I'll be ready to knock some heads!"

"That's one! Who else?"

"I'll go, I guess."

"Great! That's Hiccup from the game adaptation of _How to Train Your Dragon._ What's wrong, are the rest of you gonna let yourselves get out-cohone'd by some slapdash _licensed game?"_

"Hey!"

Some of the characters were leaving, but a good number of them were staying, and more were starting to show up as the news spread, crawling out of their individual games. Some wanted an end to tyranny, others seemed a little too thirsty for carnage, and some just looked curious. Whatever their movies, Third's army was growing.

"I suppose I'll go, hoo hoo," Turbo said, raising his hand. "I owe it to Vanellope!"

"Yeah! We owe Vanellope _the butt-kicking of her life! Woo!" _shouted a girl with a mohawk.

"Not that Vanellope, the other-oh, whatever."

"Mr. Turbo?" Turbo felt a tug on his sleeve, and looked down to see Toad.

"Yes?"

"Take this box. Its contents will help you on your way." The little mushroom handed the confused racer a glittering, rainbow-colored cube with a question mark on the side. Turbo fumbled with it for a moment, then found the lid and opened it.

"What am I supposed to do with this thing?" he asked, perplexed. He didn't see how the object inside could be of any use.

"You'll know what to do when the time is right."

"Oh, not this business, oh, honestly, can't you be a little more specific?" Turbo said, annoyed. "Now I'm just gonna be- 'now? Now?' all day and all night and thanks a lot for that, buddy, I-"

"When all seems lost, and it looks like evil has won," Toad said. "That's when you use it."

There was a pause.

"Woooooo," Toad said, wiggling his fingers. "Wooooo. Ooooo."

"What are you, supposed to be a ghost now?"

"Wooo. I'm... I'm just going to leave." Toad turned and melted away into the crowd.

Turbo shrugged. Mushrooms were so weird.


	15. No Es Una Luna

"It's like Halloween, Easter, and Valentine's Day all rolled into one," Calhoun observed as the candy army formed ranks in front of them. The rows of sugary soldiers seemed to stretch on forever, thousands upon thousands.

"Jiminy-I never knew there were this many people in _Sugar Rush_," Felix said.

"In the real _Sugar Rush_, there aren't," Ralph said. He took a step forward, planting one huge fist in the frosting. "Which one of you little tooth-rotters is first?"

The candy soldiers shuffled uncomfortably. Their numbers were overwhelming, but they'd been programmed as an audience for kart racing, not as fighters, and none of them wanted to be the first to charge into range of those massive firsts.

"They're a bunch of cowards!" said a gnomeling woman, her face smeared with frosting the same rosy pink as her hair. "Come on! Let's teach 'em a lesson!"

"Let's eat 'em!" agreed a dwarf.

"Now, now, just hold on, fellas and ladies," Felix said, holding up his hands. "It's too dangerous out there... just stay back there in the, the back and let us handle this little kerfuffle."

"I'll kerfuffle_ them!_" squealed an elf. "They're just candy!"

"Keep them steady back there," Calhoun said, turning her head. "Keep them-"

"Grrawwr!" One of the Level 1 dwarves, stripped down to a loincloth and covered head to toe in frosting, charged forward alone. "No candy licks Furffle Beardguy!"

"Stop!" Felix cried. But Beardguy wasn't listening. He plowed across the battlefield, level 1 beginner wooden stick held high.

"This is fer justice! An' ale! An' beards! An' for the honor of-"

He stopped short as a thunderous boom echoed across the plain.

Coils of smoke drifted up from one of the candy-striped cannons. A still-hot jawbreaker rolled through the icing, coming to a stop at Felix's feet in a spreading puddle of liquid sugar slush. And Beardguy fell backwards, a huge hole punched straight through his chest.

"NO!" Felix shouted. He began to run towards the fallen dwarf.

Calhoun put her a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Don't."

"But I can fix-"

"Not after that. He's gone." She looked down into his wounded eyes. "I'm sorry. But sometimes it takes something like this to knock some sense into the rest of them."

Her espression tightened, and she turned to face the rest of the level 1s. "I hope that's enough to prove to you that you're not immortal, so stay back and let the big boys and girls take care of this one, unless you want to end up like-"

"Um, honey badger?"

"No, they need to hear this. There's a fine line between bravery and stupidity. Both can get you killed, but only one will _always_ get you killed, and that's-"

"But, but, look!"

Calhoun looked. Furffle Beardguy had picked himself up and was now poking around looking for his stick. The only sign that he'd been perforated by a cannonball the size of his head was the circle of frosting missing from pink, hairy, and entirely intact chest.

"The tutorial," Scourgica breathed.

"Huh?" Ralph asked.

"Remember? In _Empire of Questing_, you can't die until you finish the tutorial. If you hit zero HP, you get knocked down and healed up to full, until you beat the bandit chief in the cave and get into the real game." Scourgica's eyes were wide. "But they never beat the bandit chief."

"You mean...?"

"They're _still in the tutorial_," the vampire elf confirmed. "And that means..."

"They _are_ immortal," Calhoun said.

She looked over the army of level 1s and smiled. "All right, troops. Forget what I said earlier and feel free to get _stupid_."

A cheer went up from the Level 1s as they rushed the candy army en masse.

"Here they come!" barked a gingerbread general. "Weapons at the ready, men, and may Wonka be with us! ATTACK!"

What followed was loud. And messy. And would probably never be help up as an example of good strategy or sound tactics (neither the level 1s nor the candy soldiers were particularly skilled), but it wasn't for lack of enthusiasm. The sounds of gummi bullets bouncing off gnomeling hides and oak quarterstaves cracking into peppermint and chocolate rang across the battlefield.

"Target their weapons!" Calhoun shouted. "They aren't part of them! The soldiers will respawn-the weapons won't!"

Ralph nodded and smashed the nearest cannon into red-and-white fragments, sending the cupcakes manning it squealing for cover. A Three Muskateers bar loomed over him, its rapier flashing in the sun, and barked, "Have at thou, villainous rogue!", but Scourgica's sword swung down like an executioner's axe and the bar fell away, bisected.

"Thanks!" Ralph grunted.

"No problem," Scourgica panted. "I think I'm getting back into the swing of it." She turned to slice cleanly through a second Muskateer bar as Ralph nailed the last of the trio with a chunk of candy cane rubble.

"Keep it up!" one of the elves screeched. "We're wearing 'em down!"

Indeed, the level 1s and their leaders did seem, slowly but surely, to be getting the upper hand. The ground had been churned halfway to butter, and most of the _Empire of Questing_ characters had "died" at least twenty times, but once the bulk of their weapons had been destroyed, the candy army's will was broken.

"Push through!" Calhoun shouted, pointing towards the distant hills. "Rout them! Drive them back towards the castle!"

"What castle?" Scourgica asked.

"Over there, behind that... that..." Calhoun frowned. "What _is_ that?"

It was an immense sphere, striped and colorful, with spikes the size of mountains projecting from its surface, streamers half a mile long hanging from each one. It was suspensed, somehow, from a rope; an enormous, impossible rope, coiling away forever into the clear blue sky.

"Is that..." Ralph squinted. "A _pinata?_"

The huge shape got closer and closer, until it hung overhead, filling they sky. Sections of the outer shell slid away, and a moment later, shapes, pink and blue, fell from the apetures. One of them landed on the battlefield with a loud splorch, creating a deep crater in the undercake.

"Hard candy?" one of the gnomelings asked hesistantly, poking the paper-wrapped sphere with his staff.

Sharp black claws tore through the paper, and something that looked like a dog crossed with a Panzer tank emerged, growling and snapping. It was followed by a swarm of purple bees clustered together like loud, fuzzy grapes, and then by a giant green ape that looked like it was covered with grass.

"Minimon!" Calhound snarled. "That's all we need. I wish I still had my plasma cannon. Never met a minimon yet without an elemental weakness to plasma."

"I have a few incendiary flasks, if that'll help," Scourgica said. "Was saving them for a special occasion."

"I think you found it," Calhoun said, nodding toward the nearest group of creatures. "Aim for the center of the cluster. We gotta catch 'em all in the blast."

"Surrender!" boomed a voice from the enormous pinata. "There's no chance of your defeating Project P, or my Minimon! And even now, my soldiers are respawning and heading back to the battle!"

Ralph started. It was Vanellope's voice coming out of the loudspeaker. But before the sentence was over, he'd already realized the truth; this was the other Vanellope. He set his jaw. Though it hurt him to hear his friend's voice coming out of the enemy, he could not let himself be swayed.. "Forget it!" he bellowed. "You're a rotten, insufferable, loud-mouthed little brat! But you're not _my_ rotten, insufferable, loud-mouthed little brat, and until I see the real deal, we're not going anywhere!"

The only response he got was a beam of green-gold energy, blasting from the cannon and cutting through the ground at his feet. His nostrils were filled with the scent of ozone and scorched cake, and a few notes of mariachi music hung heavily in the air.

* * *

Vanellope pressed her nose against the paper-mache glass, watching as the beam sizzled past the viewing port.

"That was Ralph!" she said excitedly.

"It looked more like an electro-photonic discharge to me," Professor Beechwood said. "This is an artificial construct. It has no stomach, so it can't-"

"That was my friend, Ralph, yellin' just now! He's here!" She frowned. "And, holy fudge sticks! He's gettin' shot at by Jerkbutt-Me!"

"Well, nobody has come into this part of the ship, so if we just hide for a while longer..."

"What about your little monster things down there? They're gettin' torn up too."

"W, w-well, sometimes you have to sacrifice a few pawns to win the game."

"Maybe that's how it works in your game, but in racin', if you want something done, you gotta put the pedal to the metal and do it yourself!" Vanellope wall-jumped up to the ceiling.

"Where are you-?"

"I'm gonna find the control room before Little Miss Completely Freakin' Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs up there fries everybody! _You_ can stay here and hide!"

Her voice distorted around the final words as a blue glow lit her from within, and she vanished in a splash of light and code.

* * *

The forces of the Menu Channel were gathered on a layer-cake plateau, looking down at the chaos on the plain.

"Oh dear, oh dear. Candy soldiers and Minimon on one side, _Empire of Questing_ characters and your parents and their friend on the other," observed Bilbo Baggins, who had been dragged from his cozy home in a licensed _The Hobbit_ game to serve as the army's official burglar. "And us. That's five. Five armies!"

Third scanned the battlefield with a pair of binoculars. "Hmm. Daddy and Sergeant Mommy as holding their positions. It's _that_ thing that worries me."

He pointed to Project P, still dumping candy payloads on the battlefield and emitting blasts of searing energy.

"Shoot," Kenny observed, looking down at his handgun. "Should brought more ammo. How're we ever gonna bring down something that size?"

Third scanned the battlefield, then the pinata, squinting thoughtfully.

"I've got it," he said after a moment. "A vulnerability. Now, if we could only weigh it down, get it close enough to the ground to exploit the weak point-"

"Mister General, sir?" a tiny voice piped up. "I might have a way."

Third turned to the speaker, who was even smaller than he was. "Oh yeah? What's that?"

"Well, you see how a slice of cake slopes down there? And then there's another one sloping back up, like a ramp?"

"Yeah. I see what you're getting at. You'd need a vehicle to get up enough speed to make the jump, though, and nobody has one big enough."

"I do. That is...I can get one, kind of. The only problem is, we'll all have to work together to make it."

"Not a problem, soldier."

"Well, you say that," the little man said, "but let me explain..."


	16. Katapult

The bridge of Project P was a miracle of candypunk engineering. Papier mache-molded flight chairs padded with soft tissue paper sat bathed in the light from a dozen sugar-glass screens showing the carnage going on beneath. Vanille 2k sat in front of the largest screen, manipulating a chocolate-bar keyboard twenty squares high and a hundred long, every keystroke dropping another bomb or sending out another festive blast of energy to crisscross the field of battle.

Vanellope crept across the floor, keeping her eyes fixed on one of the lesser control panels. She took a deep breath, then glitched over and began punching controls at random.

She figured it wouldn't be long until she got results, and she was right. The first few keys she hit didn't seem to do anything, but when she grabbed a candy-cane lever and yanked until it broke off in her hand, the loud snap could be heard across the bridge.

Vanille 2k whirled around, her eyes opening wide, then narrowing into enraged slits. "You!" she snarled, and fired a salvo of egg-shaped energy pellets from her pilfered Mega Buster. The deck lurched sickeningly underfoot, and the blasts zipped past Vanellope's nose, shattering on of the screens. By the time the steaming shards of superheated sugar ripped through the space where she'd been standing, she'd already glitched away.

The enraged would-be dictator growled, the blue scars on her face and arms throbbing angrily. A chorus of bleeps and bloops rang out from just behind her as her smaller doppelganger walked casually across the keyboard. Vanille 2k turned again and fired at point-blank range, melting the keyboard into brown sludge and splattering herself, but she caught no more than a glimpse of blue light.

"I don't even need to mess with the controls that much if you're gonna keep shootin' em," Vanellope observed, popping her head up from behind another panel. Vanille 2k almost blasted her again, but held her fire. The bridge was listing badly, and the Skittleometer was blaring a lemon alert.

She put a fist through her chair. She _wanted_ that glitch. She had strength, she had firepower...if she could teleport, the way this inferior version of herself could inexplicably, infuriatingly do, she would be unstoppable.

Fine. So she couldn't shoot her; the little brat was too quick on the draw for that. She would just have to resort to more up-close-and-personal methods.

She reached into her dress pocket and withdraw the colorful cylinders she'd hidden there. "All right, you little brat-"

She flicked her wrists. From the small paper tubes, two long, stripy candy rods shot out, each one made of dozens of rings piled on top of each other.

"-let's see how you do against Lifesavers."

"Ooh, more candy, yeah, I'm really scared," Vanellope said. "As shoot as you hit something with that it's totally gonna break apart and-yikes!"

The little president dodged as one of the Lifesaver blades carved through the control panel like butter, spraying a rainbow of sparks across the room. Another slash narrowly missed her head. The blades swung wide and lightning-fast. It was all she could to keep glitching fast enough to stay in one piece.

"No more playing around!" Vanille 2k bellowed. "I'm going to cut you in two and drink your code!"

The blades sizzled through the air. Vanellope glitched just in time; a few strands of burned hair and half a sprinkle drifted down from where she'd been standing. She barely had time to catch her breath before Vanille 2k's backswing was coming down on her, forcing her to glitch again.

She wasn't sure how long she could keep it up. She was just considering giving up and retreating when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something on the big screen. It was hard to make out exactly what it was, especially when she had to devote so much of her attention to staying in one piece, but she could tell that it was big. And it was getting bigger ever second.

She set a new goal for herself: distract Vanille 2k until whatever it was arrived, and then desperately hope that it was on her side.

* * *

Ralph smashed through the hard outer plating of a Cadbury creme tank, withdrawing one massive fist colored in the sweet white-and-yellow goop. More tanks were rolling over the hill. He picked up the hunk and used it to flatten a hissing Venomater Minimon into unconsciousness.

Their army might have been invincible, but with the battle monsters and Project P in the mix, the Level 1s were being mashed like buttons at a Mario party. As soon as they could get up, a blast from above or a vicious claw attack knocked them right back on their butts, leaving Ralph and the others to deal with the bulk of the attack-and they were flagging. Ralph's skin was covered in nicks and scratches. Scourgica's armor was dented and she sported a massive bruise where she's taken a Thuddolomo's mace-tail to the face. Calhoun was a mess of scrapes and welts. And Felix looked the worst of all, running between the other three, trying so hard to keep them up that he was neglecting to heal himself. This couldn't last. Someone was going to drop any moment.

And then, over the noise and chaos of the battlefield, her heard another sound, a deep, steady rumble that shook the very cake beneath his feet. It didn't die away; in fact, it was growing in intensity. The smaller and less experienced fighters, including most of the level 1s and a good deal of the candy army, began to lose their footing at the sound intensified. And somewhere behind it all, there was a jolly little tune playing.

Sweeping the remaining troops army with one massive backhand, Ralph risked a look behind him, and gawked at what he saw rolling down the side of the mountain.

* * *

"Glad I didn't eat lunch today, that's all I'm saying," Kenny grumbled, watching as the cotton-candy clouds spun by overhead.

"Quit your bellyaching, soldier," Third snapped. He picked up his walkie-talkie. "Eagle Hatchling to Prince. Prince, come in."

"Prince here!" squeaked a little voice from the other end.

"How's our diameter looking?"

"Three hundred meters! I'm picking up a lot of trees. It's getting hard to roll this way."

"Then rotate this puppy, soldier!"

"Hey, wait," Kenny said. "That thing won't broadcast through frosting."

"You think I don't know that?" Third snapped. "We'll be fine. Prince, you get this thing up to at least eight hundred and then you launch. Radio silence from now on. Eagle Hatchling out!"

* * *

Far below, the little Prince looked down at his own walkie-talkie, shrugged, and tossed it into the katamari. It was swept away, on a trip around the enormous ball of frosting, cake, and video-game characters. They'd started at the top of the slope, with minions and small enemies jumping on first, then ever and ever larger ones as the ball grew to its current massive proportions.

He spun the katamari under his nimble fingers, adding layer after layer of sugary topsoil to its girth, and started down the hill again, weaving from side to side, picking up as much mass as he could. Somewhere inside that enormous, uneven sphere, an army was hidden, buried deep under the frosting now, just waiting for their chance to burrow out. It was his job to get them the momentum they needed for that critical first punch.

The trough dug by the katamari grew as he slalomed down the slope. He hit four hundred meters, then five, then, ever more rapidly, six, seven, eight, and kept going.

By the time he hit the ramp and put on a burst of speed, it was over a kilometer across. He pushed it up, up, to the very edge, and then he let it slip from his tiny, willowy fingers.

He watched it sail through the air in a perfect arc, a gigantic pink concoction that sparkled in the sun. He was a miniature Barishnikov, and the katamari was the world's fattest ballerina, launched in a grand jete half the width of a world.

And then, silently-he heard the echoing _smooosh _a few seconds later-it hit. The katamari slammed into the pinata, buckling and deforming with the force of the impact. The papier mache battle station began to swing wide and away.

The Prince dusted off his hands proudly. Now that ought to be a 100% score.


	17. One-Winged Angel Food

A.N. - It seems like the Katamari Damacy bit from the last chapter was confusing to a lot of people. I haven't usually been bothering to give much backstory on the various elements from other games, since usually it doesn't matter that much (you don't need to know Kenny is from the _The Walking Dead _game to understand what he's doing) but I guess I can see how 'tiny little man rolls up objects, people, and landscapes in immense sticky ball then flings it into space' is a concept that might not be immediately apparent if you don't know what it's from. Sorry for the ambiguity!

* * *

The world was a pink, heavy, silent womb. A small planetoid's worth of frosting had forced its way in through the ruptured papier mache bulkheads and filled the bridge two thirds of the way to the ceiling, burying everything like a winter snowfall. Then the pristine surface broke as what looked like pink blob monsters began fighting their way out of the muck, groaning and complaining, scraping off the frosting and trying to get their bearings.

Somewhere deep beneath the bottom stratum of the frosting, her nose mashed flat against the floor by its sheer weight, Vanille 2k fumed and cursed and thrashed everything around her into semi-liquid whipped fluff.

_That little twerp! Once I dig my way out, I'll-_

A crackle of static from near her left foot brought her back from her fantasies of revenge. Then she heard the voice of General Atomic F. Bill, muffled and barely understandable.

"Your maj...our majesty!...you...ease respond if...repeat, please..."

Scrabbling around in the gunk like a mudskipper, she found the broken piece of her communication array and scraped as much frosting as she could off of the speaker. The general's voice came through a bit clearer now, still filled with steel and dignity, but also with resignation.

"Your majesty, if you're still there, you have to...roject P is crippled, you're losing altitude...our sentries at Mount Mallomar Observatory report the tide of battle is turning, the invaders are rallying... repeat, evacuate...I'm...alling for a general retreat, repeat..."

"Don't you dare!" Vanille 2k shrieked into the speaker. But it _was_ just a speaker, only a piece of the array, and the general couldn't hear her. Snarling, she crushed the damaged equipment into a pancake of metal and sparkling wires and flung it aside.

Several feet above her, one of the "blob monsters" managed to get enough frosting out of his eyes to take in what was left of the bridge. _That, _he thought fervently, _was worse than an eight-kart pileup. But at least you're still alive, Turbo, old boy._

"Gahh! My stem!" a piranha plant groaned, sprouting up out of the frosting like a pink carnation in bloom. "I'll be feelin' that tomorrow, lemme tell you. You come through okay, buddy?"

"I think so," Turbo responded. "Just a little bruised and battered...or frosted, hoo hoo."

He surveyed what was left of the bridge. Huge slabs of colorful papier mache lay covered in frosting, machinery, and groaning game characters. Their brave leader, Fix-It Felix the Third, had slammed into one head-first, and was currently stuck in the middle of the impact crater like a bullet shot into a wall.

"Oh dear," Turbo said. "Is he-?"

Third's golden arm twitched, and he pulled a walkie-talkie from his tool belt. "This is Eagle Hatchling to Sarge," he growled, his voice muffled by the bulkhead in which his face was embedded. "Entire squad has sustained boo-boos. Waaah. Repeat, waaah."

"Maybe we should go and pull him o-" Turbo began. Before he could take a step, the frosting in front of him erupted in a geyser of pink and stinging particles of sugar vapor swept over his face, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut. He opened one of them a crack just long enough to see the Princess of Sugar Rush Speedway 2000 climbing out of the hole.

She looked considerably more than half monster. Her musculature had expanded, stretching her body into Amazonian proportions, and the turquoise scars coiling around every inch of her skin were glowing neon-bright. Both arms had erupted into complicated, messy melanges somewhere between hands and guns, and gripped Lifesaver swords steaming with liquid sugar.

"I'm coming for you, impostor!" she snarled, gnashing her teeth. "And when I do, I'll tear off your head and drink your code raw!"

"Whoa!" the piranha plant said as Vanille 2k stalked off across the frosting like a vengeful wendigo. "If that thing's goin' that way, I'm puttin' down roots here, thanks very much."

Turbo's knees were shaking. He fingered the item box he'd gotten from Toad, running his hands nervously over the sharp contours and the beveling of the question mark. Then he drew in a deep breath, stood up straight, and started off in the same direction.

"Well, suit yerself, I guess," the plant said, patting frosting down around its roots. "Just don't let the Abominable Were-Glitch there see you."

The princess slashed through a bulkhead.

"Not that it's gonna be a hard trail to follow as long as-"

Whatever it had been about to say was lost in the sudden and very loud sound of Project P impacting the ground.

* * *

The battlefield fell silent. Candy soldiers and level 1s alike gaped at the sight of the enormous battle station, which had dropped from the sky, hit the ground with a thunderous splat, throwing icing hundreds of yards, and was now slowly sinking into the plain of cake under its own immense weight. Its gun had gone silent. Minimon were no longer pouring from the hatches.

"Well, golly," Felix said, breaking the silence, "it's a pinata, and you all have sticks, so-"

The level 1s raised their quarterstaves over their head and roared, pouring forth. What few candy soldiers and Minimon remained on the field turned tail and ran before they could be trampled under the stampeding horde.

"Nice motivation, honey," Calhoun said, putting an arm around her husband. "Ralph, head over there and make sure that thing is completely disabled."

"What about Vanellope? We have to go find-"

"This first. The last thing we need right now is a second-stage boss battle."

Ralph looked like he wanted to argue, then thought better of it, nodded, and began loping toward the wreckage. In the distance, the first of the gnomelings and elves had reached Project P and begun chipping away at the outer shell.

"I'll go help," Scourgica said, kneeling and using the ground to wipe corrosive lemonade off her sword. She looked exhausted, but her face glowed with the excitement of real battle; she'd just carved her way through an entire platoon of sour yellow soldiers.

"Maybe I should go keep an eye on them, too," Felix said, as across the battlefield, the shell was breached. Millions of highly pressurized peppermints and fun-size Snickers bars spewed out of the hole.

"Are you kidding? You're going to keep that hammer of yours as far away from that thing as possible."

* * *

The frosting had hit like a wave on a rocky beach, pouring over rocks and into crevices. Vanille 2k headed towards where it go shallower, knowing that she would find what she was looking for somewhere near the crest of the wave. She paused and sniffed the air, realizing that tracking her prey that way was useless-her own scent of sugar and spice and mauled code overwhelmed anything she would get from the smaller and more minimally hacked version of herself.

She bounded into the central engine shaft room, where the frosting on the floor was less than an inch thick. The papier-mache drive column had cracked when the katamari slammed into Project P, and jets of superheated root beer were spewing out, filling the room with brownish mist.

The floor around the drive column was shattered, and for a moment Vanille 2k thought her quarry might have fallen through, into the plunging depths of the central shaft. The thought made her see red. Her doppelganger couldn't die now, not before she could get what she wanted from her! She bounded to the edge and looked over.

Among the many pieces of code she'd surreptitiously stolen over the years was a vision enhancement which had originally been part of a sniper rifle. But even her sniping-enhanced eyes took a moment to see the ledge jutting out from the side of the shaft, silhouetted against the glare of searing root beet and melting sugar slag which filled the distant bottom of the shaft. And she had to squint to see the figure out the shelf. It was her other self, the inferior early version, lying in a puddle of frosting. Knocked out by a mere thirty-foot drop.

She leaped down the distance easily, sliding down the side of the shaft, which was tilted at about a fifty-degree angle thanks to the crash, and jumping to the ledge. She picked up the tiny form.

"Uhh..." the little Vanellope moaned. "Ralph?"

"Guess again!" Vanille 2k snarled.

Vanellope opened her eyes. "Yikes! Holy monkey buttons, lady, either my eyes are goin' bad or you musta just eaten a whole big bowl of Ugly Flakes for breakfast."

"They're upgrades!" Vanille 2k said, opening her mouth wide. "And I'm about to pick up another one by eating you!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, time out!" Vanellope said. "I thought you hadda do some kind of operation on me or something. I mean, come out, I'm sure I taste good, but I'm just empty calories, and frankly you _don't _need any more of those. You know what I mean, Miss Mountain O' Meat?"

"Usually it _does_ take a hack job," Vanille 2k grinned, "but our underlying code is similar enough that I bet I can just _digest _it out of you."

"B-b-but hold on! What if you're wrong?" Vanellope said desperately.

Vanille 2k shrugged. "Then at least I'll get lunch out of the deal."

And then her tongue-a long, powerful tongue she'd stolen from an unlucky wayward Yoshi-shot out of her mouth and wrapped around Vanellope. Before the smaller girl could even react, she was gulped down whole.


	18. Brittle

Vanille 2k ran her long Yoshi tongue over her teeth, picking out a few stray bits of candy that had fallen from Vanellope's hair and slurping them down. _What a puny little thing_, she reflected. _No fight in her at all. And such a shrimp! I don't even feel full._

"Man, is it ever gross inside your stomach."

Vanille 2k jumped. Someone was standing on top of her head.

"I mean, what did ya have for breakfast, tunafish and brussels sprouts on garbage bread? Pee-yew! Not that it's a lot better up here in Dandruff Junction."

"You! I just _ate_ you!"

"And I glitched right back out, uh, _duhhh_." Vanellope shrugged. "Isn't that the whole reason you were trying to-whoa!"

She jumped away just in time to avoid a literal tongue-lashing, and Vanille 2k ended up with a mouthful of her own hair. Spitting it out, she turned and launched another glistening red missile. Vanellope leaped to the side, watching as it whipped by and stuck onto the wall with a juicy slap.

"Okay, time out!" she cried. "Look, that's not gonna work, and I _could_ let you eat me a few dozen times to prove it, but I ree-hee-heally don't need that experience so let's just skip to the part where you wise up and knock it off, kay?"

Vanille 2k pulled back her tongue, swallowing a chunk of masonry along with it, and brandished her swords. "All right, then, I'll have to do it the hard way, won't I?"

Vanellope glitched away as the sword whipped through the air she'd been occupying like a blurry rainbow. She darted around the small platform, the blue light given off every time she moved lighting up the darkened shaft, on-off, on-off. Vanille 2k was even more surreal and monstrous in the strobing light, her own gleaming scars making her look like an over-muscled zebra thrashing around under a blacklight.

Her arms were long enough now that she could reach almost everywhere on the platform without having the move from her spot; no matter how fast Vanellope glitched, the next sword was right there on her tail. It was a stalemate. And Vanille 2k didn't seem to be getting tired.

_If I can make it back up to that hole...,_ Vanellope considered, pausing for a split second to estimate the distance. It was a split second too long. She felt the hard candy blade smack into her head, knocking her silly, and stumbled. The blade was on top of her then, jammed roughly into her stomach, pressing her to the floor.

She tried to glitch, but couldn't move. She was sandwiched between Vanille 2k's blade and the uncomfortably bumpy peanut brittle of the platform. _Yeeks, talk about being between Pop Rocks and hard candy._

"Do you like my swords?" Vanille 2k said with a grin. "Relics from the Betazoic age. Part of the developers' toolkit. Forged for the _sole purpose_ of eliminating glitches."

Still pinning Vanellope down with one blade, she raised the other high over her head, a pillar of solid, skull-crushing candy mass. The glow from the molten root beer far below glinted off the underside of the Life Savers discs. The sword was silhoetted against the sparking, flickering lights from the room above. And there, just around the edge of that hole leading to the surface-maybe it was her imagination, maybe it was just terror and hallucination, but Vanellope could swear there was someone there.

A shadow. A silhouette.

A little shape with a big, egg-shaped head.

_Turbo?_

A droplet of frosting appeared on Vanille 2k's face. Nostrils flaring, she turned to look up. "Who's there?"

"Oh yes, it's just me, hoohoo and, aaaah-_Vanellope, catch!_" Turbo blurted, flinging the item box. It fell like a glistening glass apple fresh from the tree, right past Vanille 2k's face, and into Vanellope's outstretched hand. She smashed it open at once. She could use any item she could get at this point.

"Whatever that is," Vanille 2k snarled, "you'd better use it fast, because I'm going to finish you off right now, you hear me! Don't you get it? I've _won!_ _I've already wo_-"

An explosion of noise and motion erupted from the shattered box, and a blue turtle shell, polished and waxed to a frictionless shine and encrusted with spikes, launched itself through the few feet of space between the two girls like an uppercut of bone and metal. Vanille 2k didn't have a chance; it would have been like dodging a cannonball at point-blank range. It smashed into her face.

She staggered backwards, bellowing like a wounded miniboss, and Vanellope felt the pressure on her belly vanish as she let go of the sword.

"Run! Run!" Turbo screeched. "Get out of there, quick, before-!"

"No," Vanellope said, standing up. "I gotta finish this now, or she's just gonna come after me again!"

She picked up the sword. It was hard to lift, but the grip was comfortable once she'd slid her fingers around the hilt, and she could move it back and forth in the air with almost no difficulty. It made a humming sound as it cut through the air, and crystalline sparks crackled along the blade.

"Ooh, neat." Vanellope struck a pose and held the sword out. "All right, Evil-y, if this was made special to fight glitches, _then it oughtta work on you too, right?_"

"Hnk..." Vanille 2k grunted. "Hnk...hnk..."

"Uhh..." Vanellope said. The monstrous girl's shoulders were shaking up and down. She turned around, and Vanellope saw that she was laughing.

"So you think you can beat me in a sword fight?" she said, blood from her lacerated face dribbling off her chin. "_Go ahead!_"

The force of her first swing almost knocked Vanellope off of the platform. Clouds of peanut dust scoured her hands and face as the sword passed inches from her. Hurriedly she raised her own sword.

"How good are you, hmm?" Vanille 2k asked. "How many sword fighters' code have you absorbed? Because I have at left half a dozen in here."

"Yikes almighty!" Vanellope said. "Just how many people have you dismantled for parts, anyway?"

Vanille 2k smirked. "It's amazing what you can cover up when you have the proper resources. I am an excellent swordswoman now-"

_Swoosh._

"-as well as a brilliant hand-to-hand fighter-"

_Swoosh._

"-and the best racer in the history of this console!" The blade scoured deep gashes in the floor as Vanille 2k moved inexorably forward, the peanut brittle cracking and splitting under her bulk. "And once I have your power too, I'll be able to do _anything!_ I'll be the greatest video game character of all time!"

_Crrrrack!_ As she spoke the final words, her sword connected with Vanellope's, smacking off two-thirds of the Life Savers and sending them spiraling into the darkness. Vanellope was left staring at a blade only a few discs long and topped with a white-hot ringlet of semiliquid pineapple, crackling with wounded sparks.

"B-but... that's _boring!_"

Vanille 2k's eyes narrowed. "What?"

"That's boring! Nobody's gonna want to play with a character that can do anything. It's not balanced." She backed up a few steps. "I mean, I can get ahead of people a lot, sure, but the players have to be really good to know when to do it, or they just shoot off the course or end up goin' backwards or somethin'. If one character's way better than the others, everyone just plays that character and it's _boring_."

"Who cares if I'm boring?" Vanille 2k snapped. "Don't you get it? By the time I'm done, I'll be the only game in town! Melissa will have to play me, or she'll be out! Of! The! Race!"

The platform shuddered under her as she punctuated her remarks with a series of angry stomps.

"Well-well maybe she won't play a racing game or a fighting game, then!" Vanellope said. "Maybe... maybe she'll play an RPG!"

Vanille 2k grinned. She flexed her arms, and metal plates sprouted up and down their length. Enormous spiked pauldrons erupted from her shoulders, and a metal helmet curled around her head.

"I am also..." she panted, "also... a level 99 warrior!"

"Well... what if she wants a puzzle game, then?"

The benemoth grunted and strained as she grew even larger. Her skin began to split apart, taking on the form of a vast mosiac, ten thousand shifting tiles in a dozen different colors, rows and columns falling, twisting, recombining.

"I... _am..._ a puzzle game!"

She was enormous now, so big that Vanellope had trouble seeing her face. It was far away, in the shadows, hidden behind a busy mess of shields and scars and metal and fur and scales from a score of games.

Vanellope put her hands around her mouth and hollered. "Oh yeah! What if she wants to play a sim game, like, like Sim City or somethin'? Not even _you_ can manage to be a whole _city!"_

"I...can..." Vanille 2k roared, "I...can..._ so_...!"

She grimaced in pain and shot up another dozen feet, roads and highways bursting from her veins, apartment buildings erupting from her back like the plates of a stegosaurus, tiny cars spilling from her mouth like honking, blaring metal saliva. Her eyes crackled with electricity.

"_I am everything!_" she screeched in a voice like a foghorn. "_I am everything, all at once, and I...am all...that matters!_"

Under all the other noise, it was almost impossible to hear the sound Vanellope had been listening for, a cracking, crunching sound like ice breaking. But she heard it, and tensed herself.

A second later, the platform collapsed.

"Byyaaaargh!" Vanille 2k screamed incoherently, scrabbling against the slippery walls of the shaft with hands that were, at this point, half plasma cannon and half ferris wheel. Neither was very suited for holding on.

Vanellope hopped up her back, through the still-mutating streets of the tiny city, and scrambled onto her head.

"Sorry 'bout this," she said cheerfully as she bounced off towards the hole above, and freedom, "but frankly, I think a little trip ta the reset button is gonna do you a _lot _of good."

Then she glitched away, and Vanille 2k plummeted into the bubbling root beer below.

* * *

"Okay," Ralph said, smashing another control panel into paste. It was getting easier now; the frosting in all the systems was really softening them up. "I think it's safe to say that this, this whatever it is, is grounded permanently. Now can we go look for-"

"Ralph?"

He turned. Vanellope stood in the doorway, knee-deep in the frosting, looking like she was on her last hit point. She slumped over with exhaustion, too tired even to lift the half-melted candy sword she was dragging behind her, but she smiled and waved weakly. "Hey, big guy."

Ralph bounded over to her joyously and scooped her up in his arms. "Vanellope! I was worried I'd never see you again!"

"You almost saw a lot more of me than you'd ever want to."

"Huh?"

"Nothing. Just sayin', I'm glad I'm a President. There's something about bein' royalty in this place that kinda makes you go coo-coo bonkers, turn into a giant crazy monster, and get completely vaporized. Apparently."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. But I'm glad you're back."

"Me too, Mr. Frosting Fists," Vanellope said, snuggling up against his bicep. "Me too."

* * *

(NOT the end. Stay tuned for the dénouement!)


	19. Your President Is In Another Castle

The throne room hummed with activity. Or maybe _groaned_ would be a better word; most of the candy army was still recovering from their defeat. They nursed lick-wounds and bite marks, and kept darting nervous glances over at the Level 1s. For their part, although the Level 1s recovered from injury too fast to be wounded, a number of them were suffering from indigestion after swallowing a few too many of their attackers.

"Oh, man, is it gonna be great getting back home," Vanellope said. "I can't believe you guys found a game that connects this place with the arcade."

"You're going to need a, a _class,_ I think it's called," Ralph reminded her. "I'm thinking 'wizard', what with your zapping all over the place and all. That seems, uh, wizardy, right?"

At the front of the room, General Atomic F. Bill and some of the _Sugar Rush Speedway 2000_ racers were setting up a podium and an entire ice-cream shoppe's worth of microcones.

"Whatever it is, I can handle it, no problem!" Vanellope said, making a smooth "everything's cool" gesture with her hand. "I beat the evil me, right?"

"What, that shrimp? She's even smaller than you! And that's pretty small."

"You should have seen her before she regenerated!" Vanellope protested. "She was super gross queen monster butt. It's just that all her extra code came from other games, so when she died, all that came back was the original stuff."

Vanille 2k was currently up on the stage, fuming, her tiny hands wrapped around the candy cane bars of her portable jail.

"Look at that face," Scourgica said from Ralph's other side. "Kinda makes me glad I don't have kids."

"They wouldn't necessarily turn out like her," Ralph pointed out.

"I guess that's true. Who knows?" She coughed. "So, er, we have these card games. My friends and I. We, er... we could use another person. If you're not busy, I mean-well, obviously you're busy, I mean people are still playing you, but maybe if there's a time where you're not as busy-then maybe-"

"I'd love to come over some night," Ralph said. "I haven't played cards in forever. And if you ever want to come to the arcade-"

"Yes!" she said. "I mean...yes, that would be... fun!"

Several rows back, the Calhoun-Fix-Its were piling phone books on a chair, the better to provide their son with a view of the proceedings.

"I oughtta just sit in front," Third grumbled. "There's an empty chair right there."

"Negative, soldier," Calhoun snapped. "After that stunt you pulled, I'm keeping you right where I can see you."

"It was very dangerous!" Felix added. "Why, if something had happened to you outside of your game-jiminy jaminy!"

"So I took a few risks!" Third growled. "I got the job done, didn't I? When the time comes, when the last straight line piece falls into place and the precious little wall of Tetris blocks that brass builds to protect it for the reality of what its like out there vanishes, you're not gonna need a "good boy". You're gonna need some who does what's right, no matter how many time outs it gets him, no matter-"

"Soldier, one more word of backtalk out of you and you'll be changing your own diapers until you're eighteen."

Third saluted. "R-right, Sergeant Mommy!"

"All right, everyone," General Bill announced. "Think we're ready. I'm not much for speeches, so let's just do this."

He cleared his throat.

"It has become obvious that Princess Vanellope is no longer fit to rule. She has committed grievous crimes against the citizens of other sovereign games as well as her own subjects, and has flagrantly and illegally altered game programming for her own personal gain-"

"You were right there with me, you traitor!" Vanille 2k fumed. "You all were! Don't pretend I was the only one who had anything to do with this, you all took up arms against-"

"Yes, ah, well, that as may be," the general said loudly, "the time has come to put this unfortunate episode behind us and turn to new leadership, fresh code to reinvigorate the crown and move us forward into a new, hopefully less-megalomaniacal future. Of course, my first choice was to offer the role to our visiting _President_ Vanellope-"

There were a few cheers from some of the _Sugar Rush_ racers and candy people. Ralph clapped Vanellope on the back.

"-the hero who cut our own Princess down to a much more manageable size. She is dedicated, brave, and good-hearted-"

"And she's got a _Sugar Rush_ of her own to run!" Vanellope protested, hopping up on Ralph's head so everyone could see her. "What kinda president would I be if I just ditched them for this place."

"Errm, just as you say," the General said. "That is unfortunately not an option. Now, my own name has been bandied about-"

He paused and waited for the cheers. A few of the sweeter candies let out half-hearted hoorays when they realized what he was after.

"-ahmm, thank you, but it has been pointed out that I was, perhaps, a bit two close to the old regime, being second in command and presiding over the attack and all. So I must, regretfully, decline."

He straightened up and spoke directly into the microcones.

"That brings us to the matter of who _will_ be our new ruler? The interim government and I have been discussing the matter at length and we believe we've hit upon the best solution. A former political prisoner who has no reason to love the old regime. A racer, like us, with the love of the wind and the open road in his heart. A warrior who stood behind this brave President Vanellope, stepping up to help her against great evil in her darkest hour. Truly, this man-yes, yes, come up here-this man is the man for the job. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you _Turbo!_-henceforth to be known as King Candy the First, ruler of _Sugar Rush Speedway 2000!_"

Turbo beamed as the crown was placed on his head. The candies burst into applause.

"I don't know about _you,_" Vanellope said, nudging Ralph, "but I've got some _reeeally_ mixed feelin's about this."

"We'll check up on him," Ralph promised. "Later. Right now, I can't wait to get back to the arcade. I think one of Tapper's root beers is calling my name."

"Tapper?" Scourgica asked. "Is that a tavern?"

Ralph grinned. "Better than a tavern. Why don't you come on back with us? I'll show you around..."

GAME OVER

* * *

Thank you everyone, for sticking with me through what turned into kind of a novella! It's been very rewarding to read all your kind reviews, and I'm so happy that so many people liked this story! It makes me eager to write more. If you've enjoyed reading this story, I hope you'll check out some of the others I've written. To quote the airlines, I realize you have a choice in fanfics; thank you for choosing mine.


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